


The Wind By Night

by tripwirealarm



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Pete's World, Post-Episode: s04e13 Journey's End, Tenth Doctor Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-21
Updated: 2014-06-12
Packaged: 2017-12-24 06:00:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 66,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/936236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tripwirealarm/pseuds/tripwirealarm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An uncalibrated reentry into the parallel universe plays havok with material spacetime in the hours after the arrival in Pete's World, forcing Rose and the Doctor into some time alone with their reservations, reflections and each other. But things may not be as easily sorted as the Doctor projects, because time is deterministic, and there is no such thing as an accident.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Forever (Or Something Like It)

“The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.”

-Marcus Aurelius 

 

** 1: Forever (or Something Like It) **

It would have been important to remember that he can't _quite_ metabolize alcohol the way he used to, but he's past the point the information would have proved useful. 

It had been the better part of an hour (forty seven minutes, sixteen seconds) before Pete Tyler’s commissioned car arrived to chisel through the tense silence that had gathered around them on that desolate Norwegian waterfront, the aftermath to an intangible explosion they were all sidestepping, pretending not to hear the ringing in their ears.Rose hadn’t had much more to say since, but she hadn’t broken down.She’d turned into him for a long, limp-armed embrace, whispering that he hadn’t even said goodbye.

Lamely, he’d apologized.She’d nodded.Wiped at her eyes.It didn’t seem best to elaborate on the idea that she was focused on goodbye when he was still there, here, with her.Instead, he’d focused on the water, the surface chrome bright with late afternoon sunlight.For most of the almost-hour, he’d watched the foamy swell of the peculiarly high tide, listening to Jackie try to explain to Pete via mobile how they’d managed to arrive back only twelve minutes after leaving while Rose stared down at the sand.It wasn’t until after they’d left he’d realized she was looking at _his_ footprints.Plimsoll tracks in the damp sand leading back to a heavy square imprint, all of it slowly being effaced by the swelling tide.

It was a silent ride in a newer model Lincoln, decent leg room and black leather seats, fifty-three minutes, thirty nine seconds into Bergen during which he’d thought, strangely, of very little other than an unfamiliar descending exhaustion and being glad that Rose didn’t seem outwardly angry, though it went without saying that this had not been her intended final destination nor he her intended Doctor. 

The unique experience of being _jealous_ , even for a moment, of yourself, no matter how many times as he’d been unwittingly subjected to the phenomenon, never felt any less preposterous.

( _"Can you change back?"_

_ "Do you...want me to?") _

Jealousy, by definition, implies at least a separation that perhaps he hasn’t been willing to accept himself.He’d felt the same in the TARDIS, out of sorts and slightly headachy, watching himself spit out orders to the team gathered at the console like some kind of bizarre out of body experience. He’d watched himself strutting like a rooster, standing beside Rose while she’d watched him with that radiant smile with only a few curious glances in his own direction and a spare friendly swatch of conversation before landing at the bay inlet.

For maybe the first time, he’d felt properly sorry for Mickey Smith.Also, he’d vaguely wanted to punch himself in the jaw.It was a peculiar feeling, and not half disconcerting: this sudden proclivity toward violence.

(Maybe not so sudden. Violence has a lot of definitions.)

Upon arrival, after the sun had set, Rose had gone quietly upstairs with Jackie to their hotel suite, and once Pete finally arrived (three hours, sixteen minutes, forty-four seconds after arrival), he had set him up proper with a drink despite his insistence that he required nothing of the sort, not offended when he had little to say beyond relating the day’s events, everything within the interest of Torchwood and their—he’d surmised—fairly thin concepts of global security.Pete had stayed until long past the grand lobby had emptied out, eventually leaving him with the bottle, a room key, a sympathetic smile and an unsolicited line of advice, “Give her some time.”

He hadn’t told him that time _is_ he’s what he’s given her, and he can already feel it running out, ticking down. What’s probably better advice is that she needs some space. It’s just that neither the time nor space she’d prefer to have is not the kind he’s able to give her anymore.The other had arrogantly assumed it was only him she’d wanted, and with a remarkable lack of insight, had thought any version would fill that order.It was an oversight he’d have been likely to believed himself if there hadn’t been clear evidence to the contrary.

For the record, in his talk with Pete he's left out the details about the destruction of the new Dalek fleet, about genocide, about murder, about how he's gone and done it again. He supposes it’s in his genetics, a failure in his initial breeding that made him into the universe's most prolific and reluctant murderer. It was only one of the reasons _the other_ would barely look at him. Instinctive knee-jerk hatred of himself and all he is, all he has done, what he would prove over and over despite so much effort otherwise. 

(It was just a Moment, distilled in quantum superposition from the modification of the de-mat gun--a moment the paradox machines and the temporal overrides on the bowships couldn't reach, and there was no other choice left but _to use it while he still could_.)

They hated each other, on reflex, the two of him.It made what had happened back on the beach that much uglier, a feeling of abandonment in a volatile cocktail with the misplaced pride of _winning_.The competitive pang he’d felt since the moment they’d first been in the same room had washed away in a sudden, unexpected moment of mixed breath and the soft pull of parted lips, and he’d been too swept up in it to even verify themournful expression he knew he would find looking back at them with his own face.

In retrospect, he isn’t proud of himself for it.He’d thrown everything he had into winning that imaginary competition against himself, victorious only because he’d been able to get out the words he’d only ever said to a purple blouse in the dark wardrobe room, where he’d left it in hopes he’d never look at it again. 

He’d won because the other had allowed it, he knew that now.He’d only had to say the words.Certainly, both of him had understood what he’d been trying to give her.Certainly, the thought had occurred to him the same as it had to the him that called the shots--what would be best.But, he’d been afraid, dreading that he was beginning a lifetime of watching her with the _other_ , loving her from an untouchable, unwanted distance, watching everything he'd ever wanted just past the range of his reaching fingertips; a custom made hell he’d been intent on smiling through because he was at a loss how else to process it. It was a fear that had receded on the beach only to firmly reblossom in his chest, only slightly modified: he would spend his time here watching her wish he was someone else.

“ _He’s not you,_ ” she’d said. “ _It’s still not right,_ ” she’d said.

_ (“John Smith is dead, and you look like him.”) _

This new him, he’s left to assume, is a supposed knock-off of the genuine article that would go back to the stars with his soul torn in half again, the one with the TARDIS, the one that Rose Tyler loves. And _he'd_ handed over the one thing he'd--they’d-- desperately, helplessly fixated on for years because he’d known what was best for Rose. Because he thought it was his responsibility to give her what was indeed best.Because it _was_ his responsibility.The same way that he would take back Donna’s metacrisis-garnered knowledge along with her related memories to keep her from burning out, even when she begged him not to do it the way he knew she would.He had to make it happen because he could compartmentalize, lock everything away, his thoughts and feelings did not get in the way because they could not.Except that sometimes they did.He was getting so old, so sentimental.

On both ends, he'd manipulated her into a better life. With the family she’d always wanted, her potential finally nurtured and taken root. A life...with him, if she wanted it.Whatever that meant.

Donna had told him, later on--over pints on Halifax-Four--what she could recall from that false life in the library.The program reminding her over and over of things she remembered, sidestepping things it wanted her to forget.She’d told him that, for a second, his image had come through.She’d seen him.

And then she’d _forgotten_.

The computer, it had wanted her to placate her, for her to have what humans crave, the desire burned deep by society and evolution--love, children, a house with a fence, watching telly before bed: a tranquil, picture perfect, safe human existence.Something that couldn’t exist once the Doctor got his grubby fingerprints all over anybody’s life.

And no, he doesn’t want to think about that now.About Donna forgetting.It makes him think of Martha and wonder if it would be better if they all could forget.It makes him think of Sarah Jane.And it makes him think of Rose, promising him forever and him greedily pretending he could delay the moment that would make her a liar.

Now he’s here, trying to promise her the same.Maybe it’s not a surprise she’s learned enough not to trust it; not to reach out and take it without hesitation.There’s a part of him that doesn’t either.Thinks something will materialize from the darkness and take this all away, cancel it out, another day that never happened.In the thrall of descending exhaustion, he nonsensically imagines the other Doctor emerging from the shadow of the hotel lobby, putting a bullet in his single human heart and changing his mind about everything.

He never would.Not even to himself.

He thinks of the roar of the flood, the howl of fire splitting the cold night under the Thames.He thinks of Donna yelling for him in a wilted wedding gown, and the sensation of timelines splitting decisively but not watching where they spiraled off.

No one had gotten what they’d wanted, in those moments on the bleak Norwegian coastline.Rose had wanted him--the other him, the _him_ _he’d been_ until suddenly he wasn’t, and hehad likewise wanted Rose.And he _,_ the one left over just by a kind of cellular roulette, he hadn’t even been sure what he’d been allowed to want.His mind told him everything was his own to control as it had always been, but one look from his other self, the properly Time Lord version he had just _been_ only minutes before (doubling over in pain against the TARDIS console, the regeneration energy pulsating in his skull, lightning in his veins, the maddening itch over every centimeter of skin) had told him otherwise.In half a day, he’d been reduced to a mere passenger on his own ship and then handed freedom and imprisonment and the whole world on a silver platter. 

A punishment in disguise as a reward in disguise as a punishment.

Certainly, in the short time he’d had to consider what the other would do with him, it hadn’t been what he’d been expecting, fearing.Perhaps, given the chance, he’d made his own case with a bit of shameless abandon; saying the words he knew the other would not--could not bring himself to say for the same reason he’d hesitated one second too long to get the words through the transmission the last time.So he’d told her; it was his own version of dropping to his knees and begging her not to leave him there to live out a quasi-human life without the one person that had solidified that desire--given it shape.Bosses and taxes and grocery shopping. Birthdays and rent checks, holiday dinners and sick days and sunburns and lying in bed on rainy mornings.Everything he’d maligned because he could never have it.

(“ _Why can’t I be John Smith?Why can’t I stay?_ ”)

_ (“No one’s called John Smith!Come off it!”) _

But since leaving the bay, the length and solidity of her silence had cemented his suspicions that she was not sold on his authenticity as much as she’d let on, and that it was the other Doctor that she wanted, despite how utterly nonsensical such a separation between them really was.Even so, she made it clear she thought of them as two, one genuine and the other some kind of novelty. 

Nine hundred and five (give-or-take a couple decades) Earth years worth of the most advanced knowledge the multiverse could offer, and here he is, sitting at a bar on a 21st century parallel Earth, just shy of actually drunk, teetering on the edge of something, looking at the dark reflection of his eye in the bottom of a tumbler of bourbon that doesn’t taste remotely like bourbon, feeling bizarrely lost and desperately wanting to talk to Donna Noble.

He’s _never_ lost, time runs through him like blood; now he doesn't even know what time it is, what _day_. Not even sure of the exact year. Not even how long he's been sitting, and even less how many times he’d refilled his glass. When he glances, the image of the bottle flickers from focus.All of this is less to do with any physiological transformation and a lot more to do with being out of sync and not paying attention, but it’s still novel, the ability to ignore it all even slightly because he _can_.

He wants to blame the other, which is a fruitless exercise: finger pointing into a mirror. He wants to blame the other for his slow descent back into the frigid bitter monster he had been, before Rose, even if it’s not quite true.This offshoot of his consciousness, (one moment his own--as ever--the next downgraded to a supporting role; the fairness and luck of splitting in two notwithstanding) has not drawn the long straw.Or maybe he had.Perhaps he would have a better time deciding the proverbial length of that particular proverbial straw if Rose had spoken more than a mouthful of words to him since they’d both watched the TARDIS dematerialize into the long shadows of the humid Norwegian afternoon.

Rose, who hasn't lashed out as he's expected, maybe wanted.Rose with that weak, uncertain smile he remembers too well.Maybe he's _wanted_ to hear her deny he was himself, for every aspect he’s changed. One heart. One life. Part human.

Once he’d even asked a Dalek how it felt, being human.Hybridized.Not long after, he’d thrown his arrogance in the face of death, that terrifying reward he’d thought he might have wanted but was yet to earn, like sleep at the end of a very long day. 

(Later, as always, he'd been ashamed of it; his chasing death like it was some sorry reprieve that it wasn’t, would possibly never be. He'd looked down at his hands in his bedroom, his wrists, the steady relax-contract of his hearts beating through those veins, reminding himself that the thing he wanted to die wasn't there in that twitch of blood and flesh--but deeper, and much harder to get at.)

He’s wanted to know.More and more, centuries passing like epochs, he’s wanted to know what it would feel like to be human, despite everything his upbringing had ingrained in his mind. _Time Lord_ mores, mingling and fraternization with lesser species was anathema on its own, much less canonizing them.He’s played so long at being this fanciful thing, this hypnotic tangle of persistence, ingenuity and ordinary fragility, that’s it’s become practically mythological.

Now, part human or no, all he wants is to prove Rose Tyler wrong.

And maybe he’ll get his chance, because coming down the carpeted stairs in bare feet, he can hear her.He knows the cadence of her steps, the ghost sound of them walking over the metal grate of his timeship have haunted his thoughts in the silence he desperately tried to fill with words and motion and travelers so he wouldn’t have to hear their soft patter over the grated floor of his mind every time he closed his eyes to rest.

He can hear the shift of her clothes over her skin, the sound of her breath, all so familiar from the time they’d delighted and tortured him aboard the TARDIS, first as one man, then relentlessly as another.His flesh had called out for her in a way he could scarcely recall feeling in all his life, and even drowning in bourbon and uncertainty, he feels that echo resounding through him at just her silent approach.

It hadn’t been quite that way at first, no.Not quite.It had been gradual, something he’d noticed that inflated in proportion with his adoration of her.It was a curiosity, an inconvenience, a thorn.Then he’d changed, and _it_ had changed.He’d looked down at her in that not-snow on Christmas Day; glancing at her while she pointed to the sky with her fingers curled up near her mouth, excitement in her eyes and frozen ash in her hair.

_ “Yeah,” _ she’d said, with a tiny nod. _“That way.”_

And, stricken with that silent thunderclap, all he could manage was a smile.He’d just said it a minute before.Everything was new.

Because he’d wanted, wanted in a way that felt different than it had before. Wanted to touch her, wanted to feel her, _taste_ her with a helpless, terrifying intensity that had him scrambling to distance himself back in those days before eventuality did it for him.Because nothing good could come of it.Because he _couldn’t_ , and they couldn’t, and he had no right and it was wrong, he was so old by comparison and it was better, just so much better for everyone if things hadn’t become so entangled and complicated that it became inexorably more painful to lose her when it was time.Because it would be time, there would always be a time.Even if she didn’t want to understand it, her vision of forever was so grandiose and young and well-intentioned and _human_ , all he could do was be honored that for as much as she could have meant it, she did.But Rose didn’t know what forever felt like, feels like.Didn’t understand what she was playing at when she used words that implied the length and depth and breadth of eternity, encompassed the entirety of time as it exists, has ever existed, will exist. 

It’s a little thing he’s noticed over centuries of travel in time and space: languages are limited to the concepts their culture of origin thinks itself capable of understanding at any given time.Languages are liquid, they evolve over time, adapt to discoveries and technology and socio-political advancement.Most languages use the word forever to imply the longest length of time they can imagine, which, given the lifespan of most species, isn’t much and is often prone to exaggeration.

Forever cannot be promised or mapped or spoken of properly by anyone that isn’t like him.Or like he was.There is only one man like that now, sealed across the void, sitting on the jumpseat in the TARDIS in rain soaked clothes, his face buried in his hands, fighting the impulse to sob even though no one is there to hear it.

He feels it.He doesn’t know why, but he knows it.That him he used to be, he’s lost everything today.Everyone.Every hope he’d held onto, it’s all gone.He’ll go a little mad, do something monstrous because there will be no one to stop him, and he’ll have trouble caring until it’s too late.

Too dangerous to be left on his own, indeed.

As cool a reception as he’s receiving, he’d never trade now.This is an opportunity for something extraordinary, like the universe has slipped up and gifted him an accidental reprieve; given its favorite scapegoat something breathtaking.He can’t quite fit it all in his very impressive brain.

He’s here.With Rose, in her forever, or something like it.

His race knew too well the ephemerality of the physical world, even their faces and personalities could change while they lived on, knowing even stars were born and died and they could see it all at once if they’d just fancied a look.There were few true constants in the equation of the corporeal, the singular timepoints, in what is and what will be.It was nothing if not choosing self preservation over his own petty wants that he’d never touched Rose beyond a litany of too-tight, too-long embraces that had winded him all the same when he’d made himself casually release her.There was one evening, he remembers far too well, standing in a TARDIS corridor somewhere between the library and the swimming pool after a long day in 1953, her warm breath worming through the fabric of his shirt and he’d hung on just a bit too long, swallowing back a torrent of words at the soft bump of her lips on his neck.Letting go had felt like being physically wounded and he’d hurried away, sick with shame at how powerfully he’d wanted to put his mouth where it didn’t belong.It’s a memory he’s stashed away for reference in texture and temperature when he’s stooped to recreating her in the silent red-tinted dark behind his eyelids, something to keep him company in place of the howling din of his own thoughts. 

He’d been too attached, almost from the outset. Far, far too attached, too emotional in a way he had not consciously allowed but fallen prey to all the same.Because she was sanctuary; she was sunshine and open plains under any sky, rainstorms and quasars and spiderwebs and star nurseries a hundred-million light years wide, she was youth and wonderment and a bursting electric pinpoint of infinite potentialities, a white hot spark of impulse and joyful mortality.She was empathy and deep compassion, she was selfishness and want, quick humor and brazen guts, the dichotomy of courage and cowardice, she was the entire human race embodied in a single set of hands and eyes and lips and he’d fallen in love with her with all the grace of a plunging dive off a building and into concrete. He hadn’t even the tools to resist it.

She was everything he’d ever admired in nine hundred years with so little sleep to mark off the days, to create darkness between time to section it all off, to make sense of it all.She was a lungful of air after years underwater.

So he’d watched her, held her hand, towed her through streets and fields and corridors.Coveted her, experienced the universe as something beautiful again through her eyes, instead of something cruel and empty; something that only gives to take back.Allowed for an idealized, almost courtly, platonic kind of love and then disgusted himself as he’d degraded it with crude fantasies, base desires that had honestly surprised him in their unapologetic vulgarity; their sweet harmony in profane counterpoint.This imagined ritual of courtly love, desecrated by a carnal shadow that passed through him with regularity like a cold wind, was always accompanied shortly thereafter by the uncomfortable certainty that he’d become depraved in his old age, that he was a complete fool and that he was so very, very far in over his head.

And when he did sleep-- _oh_. If he had believed in any Gods, he would have been begging them all for help.For clarity.For _mercy_.

It had been one of the unforgivable imperfections of the Time Lord race, that they still were at the mercy of biology. Of chemicals and tissue, nerve endings, impulses. As long as they were made of bone and blood, as long as they lived with hearts beating and synapses firing, they could not rise above painful solitude and bestial lusts and become the deities they envisioned ruling from their shining world. Their incomprehensible arrogance had made Gallifrey an ember. And then not even that.

Born among the temporal elite of the cosmos with an intellect deep and cavernous as the depth of space, he has seen the rise and fall of great empires, the white-hot death scenes and birth of stars (dwarfs and cepheids, binary systems, pulsars and eventual supergiants) he’s skipped along the length of galactic filaments three-hundred-million parsecs long, rode the charged particle bowshock of systems hurtling through the interstellar medium, seen the fires of a true hell where even death lacked any finality, gazed into the maw of the Nightmare Child as it split through the fabric of an entire supercluster.He’s seen the end of time and the expiration of matter, watched suns and worlds and civilizations and people born and die and like erosion from water or wind, it has worn over him.He has watched it all--all from the outside, looking in.He is infinitesimal and enormous, subtle and blaring, magnanimous and subversive.All of this that he is, was, has ever been and he’d been helplessly enamoured with a twenty-year-old, 21st century shop girl from South London--and the fiber of his existence brutally admonished him for it. 

It was like a quasar falling in love with a firework.The slow burn of eternity mesmerized by a flash of brilliant, gorgeous light.Trying to find metaphors to accentuate the smallness and the hugeness and the out-of-proportion-ness of it all do nothing to make it any less true. Less incredible or foolhardy.He’d not thought himself even capable of feeling so recklessly smitten, not as old and wise and hardhearted as he’d thought he’d become--as, perhaps, he’d _always_ thought himself.

_ Well _ .

His existence is nothing if not increasingly bizarre.Case in point: hotel bar. Norway. Somewhere past two in the morning local time (if he thought very hard about it), the soft crush of carpet under footsoles coming up so slowly behind him.

One frail human life.One chance and only about sixty more Earth-years left, give or take.In a bourbon haze, he can feel the muted clock-tick of his own single heart, counting down the seconds.


	2. The Most Mundane of Things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Perhaps it’s his loose tongue, and maybe that’s the alcohol and maybe it’s stress and the long, long day-week-year-life he’s having or maybe it’s that bit of Donna coming through just a hair. Or maybe he’s lived nine-hundred years not saying anything he really wants to say.

** 2.The Most Mundane of Things **

He half-turns in his seat to see her over his shoulder, mostly just so she’ll stop that slow approach, creeping up like he’s something unknown.Some kind of predator.That sudden shadow, that flash of want, even just to reach out and touch her is so much harder to ignore now in this new version of himself, the Doctor version ten-point-one.Or it could be the alcohol.Maybe it’s the alcohol.

He raises his eyes to the skylights after a moment, ignoring her exhausted shoulder-hunch and the bare arms that she hugs into her body.Ignoring how she pulls her bottom lip into her mouth in his periphery.He can’t think of a single thing to say to make anything right or easier or even bearable.

“Imagine,” he says to the ceiling.“Imagine for a minute that you’re you.Not so hard, you do it every day, that’s familiar, isn’t it?Day after day, or days in between, you know, and then suddenly something _happens_.Whatever it  is, something big.Something takes you out of your head, puts you somewhere new.” He gestures blindly with his free hand, keeping his eyes on the vault of the high ceiling, the wooden beams and glass skylights, pulling out syllables through his bottom teeth.Outside, an unhurried kind of rain is running down the domed glass, merging at passive junctions, falling into the dark. “And now as there was once only one of you, there are now two.Imagine that you are you and now, suddenly, you are not the same _you_ you were.The you you used to be, the default you, is across the room, and you’re something else to everyone but yourself.Nothing is different for you, not your mind, not how you see things, think things, say things, remember things.Nothing about who you are is different, except maybe something inside you is different, something you can’t feel without thinking about it.”

She’s come up beside him by now, listening while he averts his eyes and prattles, maybe drunkenly, maybe not.

“Can you imagine that, Rose?Imagine suddenly there is a competition for the title of _the_ Rose Tyler, and you’re not winning.”He takes a drink rather than look at her.He remembers just how hard it hit her when Doctor version nine-point-zero erupted in marigold light and cooled off a taller, thinner man with better hair, a chirpy gob and a wicked need to put his hands on her just in the way he knew he shouldn’t.He’d had to charm her then, prove he was still essentially the same, even if completely different.He wants to tell her he’s far more the same now than he was then.He wants to say he’s gone through regenerations where more than changed in his physiology than the differences between the two of him now, except maybe it isn’t true.He’s often joked that he might end up with two heads or eye stalks or gills or six hands, but the truth is (was) that he was all but ensured the same basic design every time, if nothing else, and he would never have lost a heart in the deal.At least he thinks so.It’s not something he wants to test.Not that he can, now.

She’s looking at him now the same way she did then. Like she wants to understand, but something in her can’t.And maybe she will, but then maybe she won’t.

She had, however, kissed him.Kissed him so he’d nearly forgotten to breathe, forgot to think, electrified by a profound jolt of euphoria and probably that should embarrass him, that he can be so easily derailed by such a simple, physical act.Maybe he can blame this human-ish body on his part for that, but for her part he can’t blame impulse when he’d exploited her most raw vulnerability he could have at the time.Though even if he hadn’t, the other still would have left.If perhaps a bit more gracefully instead of turning tail and running back to the TARDIS like the heartsick selfish coward he is (they are).Not that he can blame himself.If the tables were turned, he wouldn’t have been able to stand it any better than the other: letting him have everything he wants while he...

Yes, well.In any case, she hasn’t answered him.He takes another drink and shrugs miserably.

“I suppose it must be difficult to accept, even after you’ve seen it.If you’ve got a bucket of water and you pour it into a different bucket, it’s still the same water, isn’t it?Even if the new bucket’s only got one heart.”

She blinks, pulls out the bar stool beside his to sit quietly.“You don’t have to explain yourself to me.You didn’t...”

“I did.That’s the point.Whichever me did it, still _me_.”He turns the glass in the light before dropping his gaze, drags it along the countertop, a damp cardboard coaster and rings of condensation where he’s forgotten to use it.

“If it was like that, with the bucket, there wouldn’t still be the same bucket full of water somewhere else, yeah?And if it’s split in two, there’s only half the water left.”

“But it’s still water, is what I meant.What was inside it didn’t change.And this bucket’s got all his water, thanks.”He’s botching this explanation, he can tell.After all, he’s not explaining regeneration this time, not again.

There’s no metaphor, single or otherwise, to explain a biological metacrisis the right way to a human who can’t quite be convinced that two of something doesn’t make the second any different from the first, at least until the moment they became two.It’s a very human sentiment, after all, that there can only be one valid instance of anything without the other being in some way less.

“Starfish.” He says suddenly.

She raises her arms up, hands locked on her own shoulders.He makes the mistake of looking up at her; her eyes are bloodshot, rimmed with red.Exactly what he doesn’t want to see. “Starfish?”

“Yes.A starfish fragments.An arm breaks off--new starfish grows from the broken arm. Their DNA replicates and replaces what’s missing, echinoderm asexual propagation.New starfish, then.Now you have two starfish, made out of the same.Same DNA, exact same everything.Just two.One’s not less the same starfish just because it was physically there first.”

“And everything one starfish knows, the other knows?”There is just the smallest hint of amusement when she prompts him like that.

“ _Well_.Given the intelligence of starfish it’s hard to say.A man is the sum of his memories, and I admit my knowledge on the emotional sentience of starfish could be sorely lacking, _but_!--”

Rose holds up her hands, fingers spread into the air, protesting the attempted tangent.He frowns a bit, leans with his elbows on the bar top, catches a hand on the back of his neck.

“It’s not such a foreign concept.Starfish.Plant clippings.Things growing out of other things without being exactly new or even different.On a sentient intelligence level, maybe. My people were a bit unique when it comes to identity and propagation.”He finishes the drink and, at her resulting silence, pours another.He probably shouldn’t, he knows it.

“So,” she says, her voice so carefully flat there’s nothing to give her away.“You’re a starfish.You’re a bucket of water.”She shakes her head.“Same mind in a new body.Like a cyberman.”

“ _Not,_ ” he says pointedly, “like a Cyberman.”His eyebrow lifts without his permission and he casts an almost-glare over, not really meaning to.Now that he’s looking he’s not sure she wasn’t joking a bit.

“And all that, it’s supposed to make me...what, exactly? Feel better?Stop being angry?”

He shakes his head.“I don’t know. I wish you weren’t angry.”

“I wish you didn’t feel like a stranger.”

Ouch.Without his consent, a corner of his mouth lifts up, one side of a curtain opening in a smile that doesn’t feel good at all, it feels more like prodding an open sore.“You’ve never felt that way before?”

“Suppose I have.”She picks at the countertop.“He said.He said the price of saving everything was you.”

“Yep. That was nice of me.”He takes a drink, clicks his tongue.“Everything would be just lovely if I hadn’t popped up and bloody _saved everything_ when it was going to hell.Bet I didn’t think that one through when I said it. Brilliant.Talk too much, that’s my problem.”

“Tell us a new one, Doctor.”She reaches over, fingers grasping, takes the glass from his hand and drinks, which, to his way of thinking, is a rather intimate gesture to make to someone she’s just acknowledged as a stranger.She makes that screwed up alcohol face and swallows noisily, looking down into the drink for a long moment before continuing.“He said...you’re dangerous.”

“Not any more dangerous than _he_ is, if you’re married to that particular pronoun.If I hadn’t been there to do it, _he_ would have done, whether _he_ likes the idea or not.Or I would have had to, however you look at it, it had to be one of us.If I’d thought I was unstable and dangerous I’d have never left you here with me.”

“And I suppose...”she trails off, one hand clasped against the back of her neck, eyes drifting closed in a long, exhausted blink.“The two of you discussed all this?”

“Not a word.It’s not as if it’s a terribly exciting prospect, a conversation with yourself.Not much to say you don’t already know.In all your jumping with that dimension cannon, I bet that’s one thing you never ran across.Billions of parallel worlds, Rose.Stacked up on each other, membranes of potentiality.Billions of versions of Rose, even more of me if you’ve moved around in time.Did you come face to face with another Rose Tyler?”

After a moment she shakes her head, and he reaches, takes the glass back from her fingers.They’re warm, they leave negative prints of fog ghosted around where her fingertips have been.What’s left of the ice rattles.

“Even if you had, at least you’d know she was different.From another world, different experiences; it’s a different life and different memories that make a different person.”

“But just a different body doesn’t, you mean.”

“Should it?Aren’t you different now than you were at Canary Wharf?Even from how you were yesterday, this morning when you woke up?”What he doesn’t say is that looking at her now feels more and more like looking in an old mirror, seeing a kind of living reflection of himself from before his last regeneration cycle.

(“That’s me,” the Other had said.“Before we met.”Of course he’d been talking to Rose, but now he’s wondering he hadn’t been addressing them both.)

“In my experience, days don’t often make a habit of ending much or anything like I expect--but _this_ ,”he nods a little convulsively, raises his eyes up, surveying, tangenting away.“ _This_ is, I’m certain, not what you were expecting. _I_ couldn’t have dreamed it up if I tried. Hotel Bar. _Norway_. And Rose Tyler, angry at me.”He shakes his head a little with his eyes focused on the bar top, eyebrows raised, lips above the rim of the glass, pointedly poised over the faint lip print she left.Maybe he does it on purpose, to remind her.She can’t have forgotten she kissed him.She’s even thinking about it now, he knows it, because as much as they’re talking about him being him and a her that isn’t her and starfish and buckets, really, what they’re talking about is that she kissed him, chose him whether she knew quite what she was choosing or not, and how that’s going to work moving forward if she’s regretting that.

Really, if he’s honest, this is a lot of the reason why he’d never done it.Fear of something he couldn’t take back.He’d never be able to unkiss her if he’d let himself step forward and close that distance that had always screamed to be closed every moment he spent in her proximity.He’d never be able to unconfess anything he let tumble out of his mouth that she may not want to hear, or worse, that she did want to hear.He’d been too possessive of the happiness they’d had--that _he’d_ had.Wanting more, risking an alteration to any aspect of it, or just rushing the arrival of that moment when they had to go their separate ways...just the thought of any of it had made him skittish as a rabbit from the start.He’d gone a long time without a companion, before Rose.Spent a long time rethinking the entire idea of them, their function, their importance, the rules of what they were and what they weren’t.Then he’d spent every day she’d been with him reminding himself of those things, puzzled that they’d made so much sense before he’d met her, and every day since he’d lost her punishing himself for adhering to imaginary rules he’d made up himself and respecting the taboos of a society of ghosts.

“I’m not angry at _you_.”

“You are.I didn’t say goodbye, or I left you here with me, or I planned this without telling you, no matter what you want to call it, it’s me that did what’s been making you sit up awake in that hotel room while I’m sitting down here...drinking.”He rolls that word out slowly, tasting it for the rare delicacy it is.

“But _you’re_ not," she begins, then furrows her brow again, shakes her head slowly before starting over, sounding tired. "...why _are_ you drinking?”

Another shrug, since he guesses he’s not completely sure why.“Seemed like the right thing, an ending to a day like this one.We’ll call it an experiment, see how much it takes.”

“And,” she says softly, “how much does it take, then?”

He takes the bottle in hand and eyes it, thinks back, lifts his eyebrows and enunciates carefully.“A lot.”

When he looks up, it’s less that she’s smiling than that she’s just not scowling; not the picture of resigned melancholy she’s been.“Rose,” he tells her, keeping his eyes away from her because its easier.“It’s still me.Honestly, I--if I wasn’t, I’d say.You know I’d say.”

“I know.”She says it so quietly, he wouldn’t hear it if everything else wasn’t so turned-down. “I _know_ you are.Something takes you out of your head, and you end up somewhere new--some _one_ new, but not.You’re used to _changing_ , but I--Doctor--I don’t know what to feel.I feel awful that I’m not happier and worse that I don’t feel...worse.”She shakes her head again, lifts her eyebrows.“I dunno.”

He slides the drink toward her, swallows the words that jump into his mouth, him wanting to fill the silence because its so much more comfortable than listening to her breathe and palpably ache in the spaces in between.

Sighing, she wilts against the bar top, her elbows first, then her head, arms folding over it like closing flower petals, her eyes to the starless ceiling.In the half-dark of the great room, she fights tears not so well that he can’t see them catching what little light they can.“And I travelled so far.For so long.Looking for...and it just.”With a sudden movement, her head is buried against her forearms.“I worked so hard, is all, and--and I have to remember that I had more reasons for it than just...thinking I could go back.”

Rose slowly lifts her head and then the glass, looks into it before drinking.She makes the face again after she swallows, staring down into the liquid with her lips slack.“And what’s worse is I haven’t even asked if you’re alright.”

His automatic false response is interrupted by a swell of abject misery she seems to notice in his expression. He doesn’t reply, since it’s not like she’d actually asked.

"Maybe it’s the least of your worries, and, I don’t know if it helps," she says softly, "but I'm glad you did it."

He inherits the tumbler, only holding it before seeking out her face against his better judgment.Instinct pushes him to make light of it, derail her with a subject change.Instead, all he can produce is a watery smile.

“It’s not something to be glad about.But it needed doing.Always does.And if I’m not wrong, it’ll need doing again.Every time.Every time it needs doing again because they make it out, and every time I end up...like this.”He can feel her eyes on him, watching his thumb and forefinger absently pinch the lobe of his ear briefly, worrying it before letting go.“Because a mass electrowave system power override switch is really just a big _trigger_.”He draws out the last word, letting it drop low in his throat and under his breath.He doesn’t look at her.

“Yes,” he says, after a long pause, nothing but breath and the almost subliminal sound of rain on glass.“I suppose I am dangerous.And I suppose that hasn’t changed from body to body, even if other things have.Coffee instead of tea.Suits, leather coats, cricket whites, scarves, hats, new eyes, new teeth.New _hand_. But every time I’ve died, changed, everything that’s happened to me has come along with that light you saw.Because that’s me, Rose.More than any of this, _that’s_ me.I’m that light, and these bodies, they’re just the same as suits, leather coats, scarves, hats, a change of clothes.You can store me in a receptacle--a fob watch, in a storage Matrix.Personalities are just biochemical balances in organic tissue, regulation of gene expression, all amino acids and neutotransmitters, secretins, gastrins, somatostatins, and all of it fired by _energy_. That’s what went into that jar when I didn’t want to change--energy, Rose.Mine.When I didn’t want to change because of how much I couldn’t stand for you to look at me again the way you’re looking at me _right now_.”His voice rises so suddenly at the end she nearly jumps and he rakes a hand over his face and through his hair like it’s a handful of weeds he means to rip out, rubs at one eye with an index finger.

“Even though this time you’re not looking at someone different and trying to find something familiar. Instead, you’re looking at something familiar and trying to find something different.”He drains the glass, stares into it.“Life _is_ funny.”

“I’m not laughing,” she whispers, and he’s got her attention now, there’s no doubt of it.Perhaps it’s his loose tongue, and maybe that’s the alcohol and maybe it’s stress and the long, long day-week-year-life he’s having or maybe it’s that bit of Donna coming through just a hair.Or maybe he’s lived nine-hundred years not saying anything he really wants to say.“And is this you, then, snapping at me, Doctor?Or are you having another difficult regeneration?”

He almost laughs at the prospect of difficult regeneration, the exhaustion that happens when one rebuilds themselves cell by cell into someone new; remembers waking up in strange pajamas in a strange bed, a room smelling of plastic Christmas garland, of cinnamon and wood smoke and with an apple in his dressing gown.

“Chromosome architecture stabilized within minutes of the energy siphon. Six billion base pairs, protein strands and RNA products locked up all proper.The hand had the whole diploid genome map in the somatic DNA, but no catalyst.”He stretches out his hand as an exhibit, as though it illustrates anything other than this is the only piece of him she may be willing to accept as genuine.“Then Donna touched it.The energy activated, but since she _touched_ it, skin cells, hair follicles, a bit of fingernail, whatever it was, just a touch of human enough that the existing tissue and human DNA create a metacrisis--a recombination, if you prefer--and the energy just rebuilds everything that’s missing with the materials and blueprints it’s got.And it’s my hand, so the rest of me is what’s missing, isn’t it?”His tongue is on a rampage and he doesn’t dare look at her.“So I wake up as though nothing’s happened, feels like seconds after I siphoned off the excess energy, but no.Takes a minute to put it all together.All of it.Everything that’s happened, even since the moment I transmitted that goodbye to you, maybe long before, all of it led us here.Timelines so twisted up even I couldn’t untangle it until we were at the end of the knot.And here we are, at its end.So if you’re right finished telling me I’m not me, I’ve got some drinking to do to pass the time in my retirement.”

“I think you’ve had enough, Doctor.”

He nods, a painful smirk sneaking up on him.This isn’t going the way he’d pictured.If he’d even pictured anything.

“Why didn’t...you ever say it before?”

“Say what?”

“On the beach. What you said to me on the beach.”

She’s not repeating it, being vague and ambiguous in a way that isn’t Rose, and all at once there’s a stone where his stomach had once been.Funny, that-- how his tongue shuts right up, when it wants.He has to unstick it from his jaw, just to squeeze out his reply, the answer that burns all the way up coming out.“Because the universe would never let me keep you.”

He watches her recoil a millimeter, leaning away on her stool, facing the emptiness of the low lit hotel lobby, the front desk far across the high polished pine floors, a stone fireplace the size of a grand mausoleum, blazing with gas-fed flames the color of cobalt and copper.She’s a profile, sharp shadow and angles, vector curves and fractals of golden hair against firelight.He wants to touch her with a frightful urgency he should have learned to suppress half a millennium ago, and maybe he had and it’s simply that Rose Tyler has been the exception to everything he’s ever known about himself.

“And because, I just...didn’t know how--no--didn’t know the _right_ way to say it.”

“Fairly simple, I thought.”

“Is it?Languages are limited to expression of concepts its engineering culture understands. And love _..."_ He breathes it out almost absently, but still she turns, at attention.“It seems so small, doesn’t it?Encompasses too many things.It’s not exactly _unique_ to the English language, this watering down of everything until it means almost nothing.People profess to _love_ the most mundane of things. Television programs, a football team.Chocolate.A house.Songs.It’s just not the right word for what...what I wanted to say.It's still not. It can’t--not properly--but, it never can.Even words like _wonder_ and _awe_ pale in comparison to how they feel.What they really mean.”

Like forever, a tiny word for a concept the human brain cannot grasp.Uncountable other temporal ideas no Earth language has a word to remotely describe (not even regeneration is quite the correct word and neither is metacrisis for that matter) but every one of them has got a word for forever.And _love_.Love, an even smaller word that’s supposed to describe the most ineffable sensation of concurrent misery and joy he’s ever experienced.Synonyms aside, that humans can boil these things down to such small words they accept without question, that seem like _enough_ , it makes him in equal parts irritated and envious.

As though love could _ever_ be the most mundane of things. As though any part of a life shared, lived being wanted instead of needed could ever be boiled down into words that could ever be enough.

She’s smiling now, despite herself, he’s certain of it, but still he can’t look.He’s focused on his hands, gripped around the glass, erasing her fingerprints.Yes, it’s a funny old life that he’s here at all, split off and settled here in this foreign corner of existence with one chance at everything he may have ever wanted but been afraid to acknowledge, he seems to be intent on mucking up thoroughly.

“Well, how would you say it, then?If anybody knows the right word for it, it’s you.”

“There aren’t any.There aren’t enough words in the English language.There aren’t enough words, Rose Tyler, in any language.”

“Not even your own?”

His own language. Fifteen different self-referencing pronouns, over a hundred tenses and fifty different grammatical phrases, all irregular verbs, and no positive word equivalent for _love_ that isn’t of a familial variety.

Languages are limited to the concepts its culture understands. But the body, it learns.On a long enough timeline, change is the only constant.

He laughs, and to his ears, it sounds bitter.“Most especially my own.”

She’s silent now, just the babble of the rain and empty space, of breath and the sense of passing time.It’s a few minutes before she stands and circles around to where his knees perch off the bar stool, bent tight and cobalt blue in his suit trousers and she nudges between them.She stands between his knees and catches at his face, tilting it up toward hers. She's a masterpiece of human symmetry, looking down at him with red-rimmed bourbon colored eyes and lowered eyelashes, looking at him while the other is far enough away he can nearly ignore for a moment the feeling that he’ll always be there at the back of his vast mind if he concentrates on it. He wonders blandly if it is a two-way kind of mirror.A perverse part of him hopes it is.

“I travelled so far,” she repeats.“I worked so hard, saw such...I watched as terrible things happened, things I couldn’t prevent.Couldn’t change.Things...worlds where there weren’t even any pieces to help pick up after everything was done.All of it, to find the....and...”Her mouth works silently, he watches it try to make the words; words that will be as immense and heavy as others are worthlessly small. Twisted in the stomach, his single heart thumps hard, blood pressure spiking with every drumbeat and he watches the shivering glisten of tears return and spill over when she blinks, raises her eyebrows with conflicting emotions battling for room in the same expression before it settles inevitably on sorrow.

She doesn’t continue.There’s no moment to react before she’s pulled him toward her, his cheek to her neck with her arms folded around his shoulders, standing while he sits, slumped forward against her with his arms folded tight around her waist; he’d wrap both around her twice if they just could be long enough to do it.She smells fresh of citrusy hotel soap and a spicy mouthwash smell from the bourbon, and he’s never been so grateful or so kind of shell-shocked; his mind heavy and saturated like an overfilled sponge.So completely uncertain of anything in the most terrifying and exhilarating way.

Perhaps this, more than anything, is what it is to be human.Barreling headfirst into the fog, certain of nothing, not even the next sunrise, next _breath_.He could be killed by bacteria, toxic gas, asteroids, cholesterol, poison,  just one little bullet.The fact that humans even leave their houses, much less throw themselves into the situations they do, knowing their own fragility; it’s nothing short of extraordinary.

(He knows it’s science, biology, psychology, this evolved positivity bias is essential for survival, but as Time Lords had a near endless supply of time at their disposal, they’d had no need of it, and he is very aware of the realities of his new mortality.It seems a terrible irony that the race entrusted by the cosmos to harbor and govern temporal reality had so much time at their disposal that they’d come not to value it at all.)

It's been less than a week since he was nearly murdered by a group of frenzied ferry passengers.Ten approximate linear Earth days since the Library, since Vashta Nerada and data ghosts and hearing his _name_ spoken in his ear by a stranger.Twenty-one days, nineteen hours, thirty-two minutes since he drank arsenic in 1926 and, coincidentally, the last time he slept more than a few minutes in the jump seat or face down on his lab bench.

She's pulling on his hand, stepping back, saying words he can't focus on because they were prefaced with _"Come up to bed"_ and his attention had blinked out.She's towing him toward the stairs, they're leaving the bottle behind and he is feeling in his trouser pocket for that key card Pete left him with his imagination and the alcohol conspiring against him viciously.

He’s exhausted enough, entranced by present company and the champagne fizz his blood has turned into after almost a fifth of bourbon and a long embrace, that he hasn’t noticed the soft giggle of the rain has stopped.Hasn’t noticed the chill in the air, or the slow drift of a heavy wet snow falling against the skylights.Hasn’t noticed that--Norway or not--it’s _July_.


	3. Dead and Gray and Perfect Blue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "It's not quite what she was asking, he knows that. Answering a question without answering it is an art form he’s spent the better part of a millennium perfecting but it’s difficult to think about it with her hand reaching for his face. The pad of her thumb presses his bottom lip and slides away to be replaced with her mouth, soft and pressing, dry and hesitant and barely-there in little more than a shared breath, paper meeting paper before she’s already drawn back against her pillow, face flushed like she’s been out in the cold. His single heart rattles in its bone cage like it wants out."

** 3.Dead and Gray and Perfect Blue **

He sleeps like the dead.It’s fascinating in all the ways that it’s not just slightly alarming.When he wakes to a dove gray sort of daylight peeking through the drapes and Rose nestled close by--no shoes, no jackets, that was the agreement--he’s fairly certain he hasn’t shifted even a centimeter.With his eyes open, flicking around the room, he records the specifics of the enclosure, the grumble of a violent-sounding rain on the windowglass, the robotic sigh of the hotel ventilation system, the soft human respiration just to his right.

Any sense of the exact time, queerly, escapes him.

When Rose rolls over, she smiles, just slightly with her hooded eyes and voice soft when she speaks, preserving the fragility of this surreal moment where they’ve woken up together in the early morning quiet.“Hello.”

Vaguely out of focus, she looks like something he’s dreamed up.He has had dreams like this.When he speaks, it comes out thin; a little rough.“Hi.”

“Did you sleep?”She does a slow double-blink, watching him for his reply.How he’s ever managed to find himself in this moment, he’s not sure he’ll ever quite put it together--trace all the branching seconds over the last years that have linked together to bring him here.He doesn’t, has never, believed in luck outside of its relation to chance probability and statistics, but this morning he feels immeasurably lucky.

“Actually, I think I _did_.”

“Unusual?”

“ _Well_ ,” he begins, but doesn’t finish, thinking of the sounds he’s accustomed to that are now absent: the subliminal thrum of the TARDIS, the periodic grunt of the tetchy circumlocational date rotor he could hear corridors away.The last time he’d properly slept outside of the ship must have been the days following his last (full) regeneration, at Jackie’s old flat in the Powell Estate.That particular instance had been completely outside of the usual, and his control.

He looks at her, her eyes still half-mast, watching him from under her eyelashes with a gaze softer than he’s seen on her since their reunion.For a moment she’s young and fragile with her playful eyes and burning heart, not a distant, gun toting doppelganger of himself.He’s thinking about how he’s switched out a hotel bar in Norway for a street corner and grabbing a taxi home at two a.m. for Rose Tyler towing him up a staircase around the same time, but indeed, this is the life he’s never had and this is the breathless stasis that is the usual for them, this moment on the edge of waiting for something to happen.And perhaps they’ll live the rest of their lives on this narrow cliff because he’ll take whatever she wants to give him.It won’t stop him from wanting.It hasn’t yet.

She blinks against the daylight looking sleepy and small and sinfully beautiful before her brows draw together on her forehead and she rolls back, hugging her arms to her chest and talking to the ceiling.“It’s _cold_.”

Is it?He can’t tell.He’s been dreaming of snowfall and cybermen and hot air balloons.Ridiculous.The bourbon is to blame.It’s also to blame for the headache.

_ (“Jackson, you’ve got your son.You’ve got a reason to live.” _

_ “And you haven’t?”) _

“Doctor?”

He turns his head toward her, glancing across the pale hillscape of the pillows, wanting to touch but he is, as ever, the absolute model of restraint.

“It must be killing you,” she says, her face gone carefully impassive once more, perhaps because she’s caught him looking introspective. “Being stuck on one planet.One _time_. You’ll go mental, I know it; in a week you’ll be building a ladder to the moon.”

“You know it, do you?I’ve spent loads of time in one spot without losing even a marble.Two hundred years on Gallifrey alone, doing...what anybody does, I suppose.Years on Earth, in exile, if you want to know.Nineteen-seventies.Great music; terrible sartorial decisions made by humankind as a whole.And has it never occurred to you, out of all of time and space, how inordinately many times I end up in London, England?There are entire years I can’t visit again in that city for fear of crossing my personal timeline. That _alone--_ ”

Rose reaches out, bridges the gap between them with her hand on his face, the soft pad of her thumb against his bottom lip.Amazing, that, it shuts him up like an off switch.“You’ll resent it.How could you possibly be happy...?”

What she means is, you’ll resent _me_. She just doesn’t say it; doesn’t have to.“I’d just like to hear you try and tell me why I won’t be.”

She thinks a moment, the frill of her undone hair backlit by the cresting daylight.If someone could catch sunshine in a bottle, they could put her picture on the label.He would buy every shop out of stock.

“Because...all _this_.I  dunno.Sleeping in a hotel, even.It’s just not you.”

She shifts, blinks at him and _oh_ , how he wants to touch.He grips a handful of the bedcover in his fist, made restless by his ever-tiresome temperance, his cage of imagined propriety turned overnight to one of boundaries.“There is more to me than just getting into trouble on every planet I walk onto, Rose Tyler.Besides,” he sniffs, crossing his arms and his ankles.“I can get into trouble here just as easily.”

That squeezes a breathy laugh from her.With resolve, she presses her lips together in a line.Because this is a time to be serious, she must think.

“Even if you’re trying to talk me out of it, not much I can do about it now.I’ve split off.Ended up in a new body after that aborted regeneration, and here I am, dumped myself off, trusting myself to make due.”He hesitates, rolling the next word off his tongue distastefully, one eyebrow rising of its own volition.“ _He_ took the burden of the Time Lords with him, when he left.Back to the TARDIS because what else is there?Just another goodbye, as if it wasn’t hard enough the first time.”

For all the progress they’ve made in the minutes since waking, and the thirty or so they’d spent talking in the dark the night before until Rose had grown quiet beside him, now she looks sad for the mention of the other Doctor, across the void, and maybe it’s a mistake to give her the idea that he’s alone.He doesn’t want to explain how he knows.

“There’s Donna,” she says softly.Mostly for herself.She seems to miss the shadow that passes over him at the thought of her, the Doctor-Donna, the closest he’s had to a relative in lifetimes, unquestionably gone now in every sense of the word that matters.Just another farewell that he hadn’t the privilege of making.

(“ _Donna Noble has been saved._ ”)

“I’m here,” he says, by way of distraction; his forte.“I’m _going_ to be here.Unless you tell me otherwise...I was hoping I could be here with you...”Now he’s stooped back to this passive aggressive not-begging.His nonchalant discussion of his recent and massive reality-shift and his casual offer of ambiguous togetherness as though his knees hadn’t been ready to give out from under him with the weight of the possibility that she might turn away and leave him here alone.

"If I want?"

When the affirmation sticks in his throat, dies on his tongue, he only gives a vague nod.It’s humid, he can feel his clothes clinging to him in a kind of off putting way that feels uncomfortably like being strangled in extreme slow motion the same way her silence does.

"What do _you_ want?"

He doesn't know why the question knocks him quite so off-balance, but all he can do is mimic her; parrot the word back as though he’s never heard it in his life."...want?"

"Yeah, want. All this time, don't think I've ever heard you say anything about what _you_ want."

Maybe it wasn’t sadness he’d seen there after all; it sounds more like anger.And probably there is something a bit off about him that he's happy to hear it, anger directed at him for behavior not exclusive to this version of himself, if that’s even what she intends.Regardless, his mouth hangs on the beginning pronoun, framed around his unformed response.

Only then does he recall the sound of the rain hammering on the windows, the static hiss of a downpour only minutes before, dwindled now to nothing. 

The room is shadow punctured with pink, a sunrise the color of candy floss slipping under the edges of the heavy red brocade drapery, ribbons of light spooling out over the low pile carpet, one stretching long and thin over the foot of the bed, sliding over Rose’s bare ankles.He’s only just noticed it when it’s suddenly gone.All of it.Blinked out into dimness as though none of it was ever there. 

Maybe it wasn’t.He’s still tired.Exhausted.Rose’s eyes are closed again and when she speaks, it’s decidedly with the sadness she’d lacked before.“Would he have left you?If I wasn’t there...”

“We didn't draw lots if that's what you're asking.Staying was not an option, not for me.”

“Right then. He just made the decision for all of us.”It’s far too early in the morning for anyone to sound so bitter, but he doesn’t say so.

“Taste of my own medicine, I suppose.The politics of splitting yourself into two isn’t exactly discriminating.And either way, I wouldn’t fancy the idea of keeping company with myself for that long.I’d say I got the better deal of the two of me." 

She says nothing for a long moment, thinking so loudly he can practically hear it.She shifts on the mattress, rolling to face him fully."Must be odd, for you.Do you feel different? Like you told me once.The turn of the earth.Falling through space?"

He thinks, closes his eyes, grateful for reprieve from her earlier line of interrogation, though he’s reluctant to reply.Instead he deflects."It’s not something I’d notice constantly--more like...if you pay close attention, you can feel your heartbeat. Or how something involuntary can turn voluntary, like breathing, if you think about it you can take control of it."

At the mention of a heartbeat, her hand reaches, lies flat on his chest to feel the soft pulse there twitching under her palm. It’s just her hand on his chest, nothing special, nothing she hasn’t done before--but given the setting, it feels intimate enough he can feel heat creeping up from under his shirt collar.He elaborates, "That just...feels a bit...lopsided."

“It must,” she says and it’s an almost whisper, licks her lips.Again, she sounds sad.He hates it. "And...time?"

"Bit different, the flow rate here, feels...kind of jumpy.” He shakes his head, flicking his eyes at her and shifting tone. “But even the human brain perceives time, at least in its primary linear dimensional constructs the way most living things do, so you’ve likely already noticed that. Biochemistry can speed up that perceived flow, slow it down to sort through a surplus of stimulus."

It's not quite what she was asking, he knows that.Answering a question without answering it is an art form he’s spent the better part of a millennium perfecting but it’s difficult to think about it with her hand reaching for his face.The pad of her thumb presses his bottom lip and slides away to be replaced with her mouth, soft and pressing, dry and hesitant and barely-there in little more than a shared breath, paper meeting paper before she’s already drawn back against her pillow, face flushed like she’s been out in the cold. His single heart rattles in its bone cage like it wants out.

It was little more than a touch of lips, but his thoughts are scattered like leaves hit with a sharp gust of wind.This is just the sort of stimulus that can slow time down, even for him.

There’s a familiar, instinctive panic rising in him and he swallows it back while she watches him expectantly. He’s inundated by a memory of waking from attempted sleep—years back— soaked in frigid sweat, from another obscure fantasy involving Rose, of tangled limbs and a blissful sensation of heat and sliding.

It’s a memory of finding Rose sitting alone in the ship galley, staring into a cold cup of English breakfast with her eyes as red and vacant as they’d looked just the night before at the lobby bar.It’s a memory of desperation: his heartsick drive to bring back her smile following the unexpected stop in a world where her father was a billionaire and zeppelins filled the sky and where Mickey had chosen to stay.She’d been less than happy since the debacle on the spaceship with the time windows and France, and that was his own doing; his still-new impetuousness and his laser sharp focus shrunk down to a single point: repairing a timeline in furious disarray from its original and proper form.And maybe he’d done it, just a little, because of Sarah Jane, who had lived a lonely life, ruined on a banal human existence and human relationships, so entrenched in his lifestyle that she’d struggled with bitterness and resentment for years.Maybe he’d done it, just a little, to show Rose he wasn’t worth that.To save her from it.From _him_. Before he ruined her too.

(Before he admitted that maybe he wanted to ruin her.)

When it came to France--he’d known he’d find a way back. One way or the other.He always _did_ , eventually; he had the utmost confidence in that.But the instant the option had become available, he’d run off to seal a path back to Rose so quickly he’d barely spared a thought for Reinette or the inconsistently differing time flow.He’d left her with the rest of her short lifetime waiting for him to come back to show her that star.He’d fought so hard to save her from an altered timeline and a gruesome death, endangering Rose (and Mickey) in the process, then swanned off and left her to die waiting and lonely--a fate of which he harbored an unequivocal terror.The reality of it, admittedly, it had hit him a bit hard in the afterward, his new tendency to abandon others in an enthusiastic rush.Reinette’s letter, cementing her as dead in his own timestream, had only made it worse in that he couldn’t even rectify the mistake at his leisure.Perhaps he’d been a bit distant afterward, humbled by the unwanted reminder of the tragically brief lifespan of a human and all that implied for him.As though the visit with Sarah Jane hadn’t been enough.The universe conspiring to flog him with what he already knew: that he was playing at something impossible.

They’d never discussed it, hardly at all.Not Pete Tyler or Sarah Jane or Reinette, and it would be the same with Mickey.Instead, with Rose despondent at the galley counter with her cold tea and red eyes, he’d practically tap-danced around her, promised her the moon and Elvis and old New York--and instead given her the Wire and half a day without a face because he’d gotten caught up in the whirlwind of events and left her.Again.

With his arms around her that evening in the corridor, bidding her a nice rest with her still dressed in pink heels that made her taller than usual, he’d held her too tight and too long.The gentle bump of her lips on his throat when she’d turned her head had made his blood feel too thick for even two hearts to pump properly.And the feeling was of absolute, numbing panic. He'd retreated like an abused dog, plowing a hand painfully through his carefully coiffed hair because he was a half-moment away from doing something _inexcusable_ and he’d been increasingly certain she would let him.

Despite how clear it was becoming that in every sense, he couldn’t be trusted with her.

It's that same panic he’d gotten almost accustomed to after that, it welled up and receded in her presence like ocean tide, and it’s the same panic he’s forcing back now.The tip of her tongue runs over her top lip and it raises the hair on the back of his neck."Doctor,” she says, sounding uncertain and throaty.“What do _you_ want?”

She’s handed him an invitation, one with red ink and exclamation points and he’s short of breath, cataloging every soul-twisting daydream his mind has ever conjured in place of acting out, remembering every lonely mournful hour of her absence, the painful yearning for the most simple things: the sound of her voice, the warmth of her fingers braided with his, the feeling of her eyes on him after he’d looked away.

His hands find her, possessed of their own agenda, towing her forward and into him.She says nothing, only waits, and he whispers his reply into the hollow of her mouth, “Well.I’ve just come around on that ladder to the moon.”

The moments seem to lose their continuity, time moving too fast and standing still with the gentle push of her lips against his, whispering dry kisses melting progressively into another and another, less tentative each time until it’s all dropped into heart-pounding, open-mouthed slow motion all with hands clutching clothes convulsively in white knuckled fists.He reaches to catch the back of her head, finding his fingers fascinated by the slip of her hair and the curve of her skull in his palm, her hands crawling over his shoulder blades and down the slope of his back, touching freely and he drinks it in because his body is a desert and her fingertips are rain.

_ Rain _ . It’s raining again, he can hear it, blasting against the windows.It rumbles low in the spaces between their breaths, the wet sound of their connected mouths, the hush of fabric moving against fabric.She insinuates a thigh between his, tilts her hips.The bare sole of her foot slides, toes hooking the cuff of his trouser leg and dragging upward along the back of his calf in a move so blithely erotic it makes him feel in an instant more stupefied than he had after hours of drinking.Her tongue curls at the ridge of his teeth and he swallows a shuddering sigh at the buried animal instinct that moves his body against hers with every wrong, bad, beautiful perversion his suffering filthy mind has ever harbored about her body and her mouth and the sound of her imagined outcries ringing through the dark empty canyons of his intellect.

And something is going to happen.His muscles are tensing up.His muscles always tense up before something happens.They are folded around each other on top of the duvet (no jackets, no shoes, that was the agreement), flesh and blood origami and her skin is burning hot, a tiny sound made at the back of her throat drowned out by a peal of thunder so earsplitting that Rose starts violently, gasps against his mouth, shock driving a wedge between them; cold water on melting ferocity, and his head throbs in response.

Looking down on her flushed face, the pinched and shadowed expression on it, there is a irresistible urge to apologize profusely.Maybe there’s no call for it, but it rushes out anyway, a flood of remorse because she’s been so undecided on him and he’s so confoundedly _sorry_ that he’s somehow found himself in this hell where he’s not quite what she wants.

“I’m sorry,” he tells her in a rush of breath.“Rose, I’m sorry--really.”

Her head has twisted toward the drapery on the far wall, her face and attention diverted long enough he can draw back and will away the reflexive shame that’s boiling up, louder in his ears than the storm whipping in off the sea and slamming into Bergen.

“ _Oh_ ,” she says, and her lips are so pink.She swallows hard, shifts backward from him.A moment passes before the strange silence that has grown over his mind, like a kind of moss or cobweb, clears away and thoughts shiver back into focus.His first thought is if the other could see through the weak remaining telepathic window, even across the void, he would want him to have caught a glimpse of the last two minutes.It’s a spiteful thing, but he’s lived more than nine hundred years and can’t recall a single moment in all that time that had felt quite _like that_. So out of control and gorgeous.

He’s not sure if he wants to share it or wave it in the other’s face like a victory flag.Which of the two will likely depend on how upset she is about it.Is she upset?He thinks she might be upset.

His second thought, more vaguely, is the rain. It's barreling into the building, the wind a mechanical groan like bending metal that sounds nearly as frustrated as he's found himself.One of them is trembling; he’s embarrassingly certain it’s him.She’s turned back and opened her mouth to reply, before another bellow of thunder shakes the walls and the teeth in their skulls, then shrinks to silence so abruptly that glass in the mounted picture frames is still shivering audibly in the sudden vacuum of sound, almost as though it hadn’t a chance to finish.There’s no echo.

The downpour, as well, has stopped.Blinking, he remembers the pink sunrise strung translucent and glowing over Rose’s bare feet, creeping in through a gap in the drapes.It had been there.Then it hadn’t.

The Doctor watches her watching his face carefully, the question taking slow form on his features.

Eyes pried wide enough he can see the whites all around her irises, she draws herself up on her elbows while he climbs up, taking a moment sitting on the bedside to pull a hand through his sleep flattened hair.He breathes slowly, in and out.Cooling off.Willing away a strange vertigo that reaches up through the floor and _pulls_.

“You...alright?”

He hauls himself to his feet and closes the distance to the slider in a few strides, not pausing before throwing back the drapery hard and clenching his fist against an the withering nausea that grips him at what is waiting for his eyes behind that barrier of heavy embroidered brocade.He forgets to answer her, because he’d been utterly brilliant a minute before and now that he’s seen outside, he’s drifting rather quickly toward _not okay_ and is forced to reconsider exactly how lucky he is--they are--to be here.

The sky is a tangled riot of motion and surreal stillness; frayed wires of frozen lightning stretch across dark swells of cloud that flicker to clear blue, distorted shapes of zeppelins extend from themselves in spiderwebs of jerking motion in every direction.It’s daybreak, storming violently and clear as a bell and buried in snow.The sky is filled with vehicles and all their flightpaths and also abandoned in the weather, black as midnight, burning with stars, a sunrise tangerine and salmon pink, dead and gray and perfect blue.All of it shifting, twitching in time, trembling on the edges of his vision like a camera winking out of focus, a reel of film slipping off its track.

He’s seeing all of it at once, everything that can be in relation to this moment, everything that _is_ ; all available realities in superposition.Potentiality.Visibly, with his eyes, which is not how he’s ever perceived timelines, and all of this without even _trying_. He wants to blame his ill-advised binge drinking the night before or some kind of strange metacrisis-hangover or maybe even the dizzy arousal he’s still cycling out.But it’s not, it can’t be, but for the life of him, he has no other ideas of why he can see tangible potentials like a _Meanwhile_ ; why this branch universe now looks like a world in the thrall of macroscopic quantum phenomena.A locked state of material absurdity.

What did that metacrisis do?(Why hadn’t he seen it the day before?)

He breathes in slowly, fighting a tremor that wants to take over at the unsettling familiarity.He thinks of Arcadia, of Elysium, the insurrection of the Skaro Degradations.He thinks of things that happened and never happened and turns his eyes to Rose as she’s coming up behind him, one hand on his bare arm with her eyebrows pushing together on her forehead.She squeezes her eyes shut and reopens them, squints before closing them again, presses the pads of her fingers against the lids before trying again.Her breath has grown short and fast, and he can’t blame her because it means she _can see it_ all the same as he does; the way _no one_ should see.It wrings his stomach like a wet towel inside him, throat burning with either bile or some kind of nervous, sick laugh accumulating at the back of his tongue like dew gathering on a leaf.

(“ _That’s what I see,”_ he remembers saying to her once in a douse of gold light and fear and overwhelming affection that is nothing when viewed in the light of what he feels now, looking down at her face as it tries to decide on an expression.“ _All the time._ ”)

(And doesn’t it drive you mad?)


	4. Liminality

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "She'd learned to accept his regeneration, though even now trying to reconcile two men so wildly different and yet so specifically the same still felt like she'd blinked and missed something. (She's since grown used to the feeling: now her entire life feels a bit like that.)"

 

**4:   Liminality**

She watches his face, it usually says more than he does. 

It’s a peculiar kind of daylight that’s coming in through the sliding door, quicksilver bright and shifting, sunrise to grey.  He’s staring out the glass in that vacant, half-blinking way of his, eyes popping side to side, brows perched up while his brain computes.  His lips hang open around a thus-far unspoken word, the first in a likely flood. 

She’s seen this shadow play on his face so many times; it’s surreal to see it again in this setting.  Her mouth’s gone dry and stiff, her throat hollow, everything scarcely holding together at all.  She’s paper-maché, held up with glue and wires.  She feels that empty, that strange.  Like the wind could pick up and she’d just blow away.

It’s not a question that he’s the same man.  She knows that much.  She remembers every little mannerism, she’s dreamed of them all, cobbled him together in her head out of these tiny pieces in the dark of night, something to bear her up when she’s felt the most like she’s sinking.  She’s stood in the shower stall, water hot as she can stand it and beating down on the crown of her head, recalling details so she won’t forget them: the impatient way he stirs his tea when it’s too hot, the way a smile crawls over his face in slow motion from the bottom up, the back-lit brown of his eyes—the color of a root beer sweating cold in the summer sun. The indescribable smell of his shirt collar under her nose: something like French toast and cold air.

Saying he felt like a stranger was a lie, but at the time, the idea made her feel better.  Like she didn’t know him, that he wasn’t to blame for anything.  He was abandoned the same as she was.  The truth is that he feels so much the same that it’s just that much worse, that much more confusing, and it felt better to pretend she knew how she felt about anything.

Denial was stage one, she knew that from her therapy.  The stages of grief or loss or whatever it was.  The Elisabeth Somethingorother scale. Pete had insisted on her seeing a Torchwood counselor, sometime after the long, strained drive home in that old Jeep with all her luggage still in the boot and her heart still scattered in pieces like driftwood on that beach in Norway.  Because, Pete had said, it was like a death.  It was loss, plain and simple.  Unexpected and sudden and devastating.  And after the bane that Lumic had brought on this world--he knew all about that.

She misses stage one.  It hadn’t lasted very long, she’d moved onto anger in record time.  (“You can’t,” he said.  _You can’t_.)  Her bargaining phase had lasted, however, long enough that she’d bargained her way into a parade of alternate universes when the walls had thinned out.  Now she’s back to pretending, or half-pretending, or maybe she just can’t quite put a finger on any of it.  If she’s angry or sad or happy, if she hates or loves or even knows him.

She’s been more than a bit hot and cold.  She knows that too.  The last thing she wants is to be cruel to him.  It’s not as though this all isn’t difficult enough for everyone.

But here she is, fresh off rubbing herself up against him in bed like she's only ever thought about with no second-thought about her morning breath or bad hair and no matter how much and how long she'd wanted it, falling into it now feels unsettlingly like betrayal; of who or of what, that’s less clear.  She'll be the first to admit it's a stupid thing to feel, and not a little because he'd turned away and left without even a proper goodbye, without anything, and he didn't bloody deserve her would-be fidelity to start. (Except he did. _Of course_ he did.)

But more because she can't rightly call herself abandoned by someone who is, by all accounts, standing in front of her.  She can’t mourn someone who is in the same room.  He’s managed to take even that away. 

She'd learned to accept his regeneration, though even now trying to reconcile two men so wildly different and yet so specifically the same still felt like she'd blinked and missed something. 

(She's since grown used to the feeling: now her entire life feels a bit like that.)

She'd accepted that he'd lost a hand and grew another; it was one of the most concrete, tangible ways he'd ever proved truly alien, but it was simple enough. He'd lost a hand, and then he grew a new hand.  He’d once changed into a different person right in front of her.  After all of this, it hasn’t been that difficult to reconcile the idea that his hand had simply grown a new body and the reality of the Doctor standing here in this Bergen hotel room.  Time Lords and their unique biology.  The starfish of the universe.  

Without a doubt, she’s seen stranger things.  Nonetheless, one moment she’s ready to accept him with the ease that feels natural; the next there’s a stinging guilt.  The feeling that she’s allowing him to tell her _she can’t_ all over again.

Because she _can,_ she _can_ , but she’s worried that maybe she doesn’t want to anymore. 

Staring outside, her mind is flooded, overwhelmed, and she stares, everything spiraling through her head fast as a sneeze: The Doctor and the hand and the Elisabeth Whatever scale, then she forgets.  All she can see is chaos made of shifting light and shapes and dizzying things her eyes can’t understand all at once.  What she can see is a problem screaming for action, and even this mustbe more cut and dry than the war waging under her skin.  Here there can be an answer, nothing subjective, something she can solve.  She’s already fumbling with the Torchwood wrist-mount she’s left on top of the heap of her blue jacket, twisting knobs with fingers that feel too big.

“ _Control_!” 

The reply is only a burst of static, the high whine of bending frequencies, a grinding cacophony that rattles her eyes in her head, makes her skin feel too tight before she switches the device off again and strangles the urge to hurl it into the wall, crams it into her back pocket instead.  The mission had been reported as completed; no one would be in the booth now. Not this early.  They wouldn’t even be waiting for a signal.

“Rose.”

She’s standing in her bare feet, yelling into a Torchwood communicator as though the Doctor isn’t standing a meter away with his mouth twisted, head pitched to one side.  Perhaps, if he’d been the other Doctor...

(The other Doctor who would never have kissed her like this one just had, immediate apology or not.)

( _Stop it_.)

“ _Rose_.”

“What is this?”  She points vaguely in the direction of the window, tucking her hair behind her ears on both sides with a snap of her hands.  It’s her professional calm, cultivated over years, and she pulls it on like a fencing mask.  “Doctor. What is _that_ , out there?"

“It’s...” he starts, voice dropped low enough in his throat that it’s evident he’s unsure how to continue.  He turns, hands in pockets now.

"Doctor," she says woodenly, and he frowns just at the tone. "What the _hell_ 've you done now?"

He visibly recoils, hooks a hand on the back of his neck, eyebrows rocketing upward.  " _What_! I've scarcely been out of your sight, how could I have--"

"Because you're _you_ , Doctor," she almost chokes on it but it’s the truth, and she knows it no matter how difficult it is to reconcile with what she knows. "Nothing was this way any other day I've been here for three years; you're here _hours_ and the whole thing's gone unraveled!"

"It's not unraveled; it's…practically the opposite, if you want to be more accurate. It's _raveled_ ,” he accentuates this word exactly in a way she remembers, the vowels through his teeth and it does strange things to her, makes her want to laugh and makes her eyes burn. “All of it--everything together.”

“You’re saying it’s a coincidence, then.”

“ _Well_.  No.”

“This has something to do with us.  Because we're here and...”  she comes up beside him to stare outside, the bright twitching net of zeppelin flight paths as though they were all places at once, a bright jumble like a coil of Christmas lights strung through the air with the scorched wasteland below also verdant and overgrown and paved over, bright with sunshine, slick with urban rain, buried in snow. “The atmosphere was heating up.  Dad... _Pete_ told me, about how before I came here, they were saying the polar ice caps were melting.  Global temperatures going up, and Torchwood knew it was the breach, leaking radiation from the Void.”

“Thermodynamic radiation.  Every jump punched another hole in the dimensional membrane.  This world was already damaged by loss of equilibrium at quantum level, it’s likely the damage would be exponential if the breach were to be opened again.”  He plows a hand over his face, looking grim.  Pale. 

“But why wasn’t it like this _right away_ , when we got here?  Why right now?  What’s changed?”

“Not so much changed.  This is reality as it always exists, just not how it’s regularly perceived.  Reality and time as seen properly, all probable moments occurring simultaneously in respect to the established preceding measures of time infinitely smaller than seconds.”

She turns to him, the shifting daylight on her face and her folded arms when she huffs at him.  “It _has_ changed.  Things weren’t this way yesterday, not even a few hours ago.  Not for me, at least.  When we went to sleep, we would have noticed if things were this way, would’ve seen it outside, wouldn’t we?  And why is it only outside?”

“Went to sleep...?”

“You just said a few minutes ago that you did.”  The idea that he may not remember feels like ice water trickling down the ravine of her spine.  “Don’t you--”

“Went to sleep,” the Doctor repeats, a gleam of mania flashes over his face, eyes wide.  “Rose.  We went to _sleep_.”

She watches as he reaches up, plowing his hair back from his face with one hand, turning away from the window to pace a few steps toward the wall before wheeling back.  “We went to sleep.  We weren’t watching.  Weren’t _observing_.  Measurement of a system requires an observer; electrons can’t collapse their wave functions without an observer choosing the most probable sequential outcomes in linear time.  Everything possible from one moment to another is available, and exists simultaneously, but can’t be perceived by most things without specific circumstances. This moment here, with us, you and me in this hotel room in Bergen--having _this_ conversation--has always existed.  Will always exist.  Moments in time cemented in their prime condensate are coordinates, everything else is this,” he gestures with an upturned palm toward the window, then shrugs in what is likely to be the most inappropriate display of casual uncertainty ever demonstrated.  “Liminality.  Between-time.”

He’s rambling and she just stares.  Part of her is trying to listen, honestly listen, despite how well she knows it’s impossible to ride his train of thought without falling off spectacularly.  

“There is a branch reality, likewise, for all relative variables.  Parallel worlds created by the existence of potential wave functions, each creating their own branches in all their similarities and variations and it’s all so _fragile_.  One change, one word in the wrong place...”

“Can interrupt the causal nexus,” she finishes, and the stunned expression he makes is something she wishes she could frame on a wall.  He doesn’t even sputter, just silences entirely, lips still open to speak.  Despite the situation, she feels a smile tug at one corner of her mouth like an irresistible fishhook and flatlines her lips to counter it.   “Bound to learn _something_ working on a transdimensional travel device.”  She slows the technical term down as she enunciates it, just out of habit.  “The consequences of interference and related precautions would be the top of that list, I should think.  Afraid my physics classes didn’t cover much of the quantum stuff.  Or ‘any’ quantum stuff, more like.”

“Y...yes,” he says, with an almost imperceptible nod, taking a large breath before his eyes slingshot away with a distinct air of discomfort, looking back to the mess outside the glass of the sliding door. 

“Is that what this is?  Have we...did we start something that’s only now taking effect? Like...I dunno, like Donna said. Dimensional retroclosure?"

“Could be.  The reality bomb never leaked through the dimensional membrane, the electromagnetic force isn’t negated by a flood of zed neutrinos with half-integer spin, mass holds shape, the stars don’t go out.  Other forces aren’t affected but then perhaps they are, the instability of neutrinos notwithstanding--”  With little fanfare, he turns again and whips open the glass door, slipping outside onto the balcony and into the barreling rain that shifts into snow, the dark that becomes light and everything else at once.  On reflex, she calls out, her hands snapping into fists.

“ _Doctor_!”  

She watches him lean out, squinting and bowing forward against the slanting curtain of water, far to one side, then the other, gripping the metal railing where a thousand people before him have clutched the paint off.  “It’s not unreasonable to think these are some kind of reversal effects,” he calls back in over his already soaked shoulder.  “Retroactive from the bomb’s failure and the Earth’s involvement in the planet engine.”

He’s back inside so fast she barely registers his movement, bounding inside and snapping the slider shut behind him, reaching down for the hem of his shirt, not even pausing before stripping it over his head.  He sweeps into the washroom where she hears him work the sink and emerge a minute later with his wet hair raked back from his face, gripping a white hotel hand towel and bounding back to the window in his water mottled blue trousers and bare feet as if it’s all the most normal thing in the world.

“But this Earth,” she says evenly, coolly, but her eyes are on his skin and doesn’t she just hate herself a little for registering the little round mole just between the points of his shoulder blades while he reaches out to move the drapery further back; for cataloging the constellations of freckles along the ridge of his spine.  “It wasn’t moved.  Was it?”

“No,” then he pauses, turns, teeth visible in what only looks like a smile.  “No, it wasn’t.  It was our Earth.  _Ours_ taken into the Medusa Cascade, into the rift, one second out of sync with the prime fabric...”

She’s following now, a familiar exhilaration swelling up uncontrollably under her tight composure.  It’s not the right reaction, she knows that.  “It wasn’t ever switched back.  Resynced?”

“The rest of the planets were trans-matted back with the magnetron, resynced to their original coordinates in time and space but Earth, oh, of _course_ ,” he growls the last word, bringing up a hand and gesturing at her with an open palm and flexed fingers like he’s holding an invisible grapefruit, eyes wide with the light of sunrise sparking the color of rosewood on the fringe of his eyelashes and all by himself, he’s a kind of performance art that she can’t look away from no matter how much she wants to.   “Earth had to be physically moved.  By us, by the TARDIS, and he never...”  

His mania goes flat in such a sudden moment it’s like hitting a brick wall at top speed, his voice growing small.  “He never brought the TARDIS out of liminal time.  Everyone else was sent back to points on that Earth, time consistencies, they’d never see it.  But, no.  Not us.  Travelling temporally might be enough to collapse matter wave functions for mass being _observed_ but...”

Rose lets out a breath she doesn’t realize she’s been holding, her hands knotted together.  “So the world can't hold together because we stopped looking at it?"

He catches at the back of his neck, cranes his head back with his face toward the ceiling, eyes squeezed shut.

“Why could that happen, Doctor, why wouldn’t we automatically resync when the TARDIS materialized?”

“This world runs ahead, there was an existing time asynchronicity.  Has to be that. We’ve talked about it before.  Millions of cybermen crossing at once, bending the void.  Think of like...”  He paces a few steps at a time like something caged at a zoo, looking restless.  “The wind blowing a sailboat, pushing the movement ahead with force, that’s what happened with the time synchronicity between the two; one’s forced forward by a vast quantity of mass.  So the TARDIS punches through the membrane in the way it shouldn’t with the link to the Eye of Harmony working blindly through the timelock, parallel coordinates can’t be computed reliably via the TARDIS’ organic block transfer computations.  The entry is already shaky, damaging an already stressed membrane, the bosons aren’t fully manifested, collapsed out of the wave function properly.  Then we fell asleep...”

She doesn’t say anything.  He’s talking to himself mostly anyway.  He can’t think she knows half of what he’s said, no matter how she might try. And she’s always prided herself on trying.

“It’s us,” he says haltingly.  “It’s not here.  Not void radiation or global heating, any of that.  Everything here is just as it always was.  _We’re_ what’s wrong.”

“Doctor,” she intones, but doesn’t finish.  His mania is in full swing; there’s nothing he loves more than a good disaster except perhaps abating one.

“ _We’ve_ slipped back into liminality, you and I.  We were never fully harmonic with the resonance here because of the particle decay.  I felt it the second we stepped out; just thought it was the new body.  Something jumpy, kind of twitchy.  I dunno.”  He rubs a hand over his face again, crossing back to the window to stare out.  “We could be held down in the system when we were being measured, even if it was just us observing each other, or _ourselves_. Others lost sight of us, and then we fell asleep.  Lost our _own_ ability to play observer for our own mass.  Without the observer effect, we’ve fallen to the lowest quantum state available, and probability density has scattered around us.”

“And you know this, how?”  She lifts her chin in a single upward nod, watching his face do all the things it does and doing her best to stay neutral about it.  “You see this out there and just now all of that makes sense to you?  None of it even came to mind before now?”

“I...no?”  He seems confused.  She’d often challenged his methods, occasionally his morality, but never his theories or how they’d conveniently create themselves when he required them.  “How could I’ve--”

“Why did you apologize?”

Well.  Now he’s confused, that’s clear.  There’s a part of her that feels miserably sorry for him, the same part that immediately regrets everything she’s throwing at him all out of order and not at all what matters most now.  His eyes flick to the window, then the wall, as though a conversation transcript is written there he can refer back to and see where they went wrong.  She watches his mouth slowly make the “w” sound long before it actually comes out.  “When did--”

“Just now, well not _now_ , five minutes ago,” she points to the bed with its crumpled duvet cover and head-dented pillows.  “You kissed me and then apologized like you’d done something wrong.”

Certainly, now is one of the times his face is writing a novel while his tongue has forgotten spoken language entirely.  His is the expression of a child being asked to explain why he’s lied about breaking something.

“Isn’t it?” he asks, so softly she barely registers before he rephrases.  “Was it wrong?” 

“You don’t think I wanted it.”  This doesn’t come out as a question at all.

When he speaks, it’s so small and uncertain, for a moment, it’s like she doesn’t know him after all.  “I don’t have any idea what you want, Rose.  None, absolutely none.”

“Well, yesterday, both of you thought it would be a good idea to just dump us off here because you certainly thought you knew what I wanted then.”

She’s immediately sorry.  She wants to reach out into the air and grab her words before they reach him, stuff them back down her throat.  But sound travels faster than her regret, and with a stricken look, he picks his shirt up from the armchair’s backing where he’d dropped it.   He snaps out the wrinkles and pulls it back over his head, looking everywhere but her face. 

It’s the same kind of look her mother had avoided looking at her with, in those first days back after the daylong drive home through Bergen to London via Belgium, Denmark, Germany, no place she’d ever been in her own world anyway.  Thirteen-hundred miles of mostly silence and smothered coughs, radio in a tangle of foreign vowels and static, crackling fast food wrappers in the back seat of Pete’s jeep, the perpetual squint of a ten-hour headache.

For months afterward, every voicemail Jackie left on her phone ended with _I love you_ instead of any kind of goodbye.  Often it was a reminder to eat, to call later.   Every time, at the end, Rose had pressed three to save the message, instead of deleting it.  Just because.  Maybe, suddenly, out of nowhere one day, it would be the only way she’d ever hear her mother’s voice again.  (The way maybe she’d never hear his.)

She still has all of them, digitally immortalized the way ancient people carved things into stone to keep them forever, because it was an unfortunate side effect of her planned future that the only part of Jackie that could come along with her was her voicemails.  She’d sat on brick walls and grassy hillsides in twenty different universes while the cannon’s heatsync recharged for twenty minutes, listening to her mother reminding her to eat.  Saying _I love you_.  Not saying goodbye.

Then pressing three to save it.

Because maybe saying I love you instead of goodbye was always better, but she'd been cheated out of both of them once. Except that now she was ignoring the _I_ _love you_ she'd been given and was fixating on the goodbye she hadn't. Maybe she'd never work out exactlywhy she was so angry.

“Are we stuck like this?”  Her tangent back to the matter at hand snaps his head back to look at her so fast, he’ll have whiplash later. 

She’s being irrational.  It comes with the territory.  Her sleep cycle is still recovering, she hasn’t eaten well in a week and it’s less than 72 hours since she’d sat in a refrigerated room at U.N.I.T. over the drowned body of yet another version of this same man with lips ghostly blue and hair still wet like this-Doctor’s is now. 

(She’d kissed his cheek.  It was cold as kissing marble.)

Grief counseling be damned, she’d be at some version of the bargaining stage forever.  Even now, she was making excuses to be unhappy.  Remembering things that happened and didn’t happen to justify her swelling and ebbing anger.

Rarely had she ever argued with the Doctor who had this face, but even now she watches him swallow a sharper comment to reply with an even objectivity, keeping his tone as light as it’s ever been.  “We...we need to pull ourselves back into sync with the resonant frequency of matter in this universe.  Neither of us are made from building blocks that originate in this reality, our particle resonance is bound to have a natural degree of dissonance that’s contributed to the phenomenon.  We’re not so far out that the density is infinite.  It _wants_ to decide on rain out there, the light is most changeable because photons have integer spin--opposite of neutrinos, like I said--and the intrinsic particle spin is always opposite the linear momentum.  If we can _modify_ our own mass waves via supersymmetrical...”

“Jesus,” she snaps.  “Stop it.  There’s no reason to confuse me on purpose.”

His throat bobs in a tight swallow.  It’s almost as though he counts to three before he speaks again.  “I wouldn’t--”

“Why did you _drown_?”

She’s not sure if any version of the Doctor has ever looked so openly frustrated.  Maybe it’s just that he’s half-soaked, he’s just standing there looking so deceptively normal while he’s rattling off the kind of Gatling-gun-science that almost sounds like total nonsense the same as he would have always done.  He looks like a tall, skinny bloke in his mid-thirties with wet dark hair and bare feet and a rain-spotted shirt, and even if he’s talking about particle spin and matter resonance, there’s nothing about him that looks like a nine-hundred year old Time Lord that’s seen the width of eternity who’s split himself in half and offered to spend what’s left of his life with her in the most ambiguous almost-proposal she’s ever heard.

All he says is a soft repeat of what she’s accused him of doing, as though he’d done it on purpose.  “Drown?”

“You _drowned_.  In Donna’s pocket universe, where she never met you, where London was destroyed, you drowned when the flood barrier under the Thames collapsed.  Fighting the Racnoss.  You drowned them all, and then you couldn’t get out.  Donna’s world--it was in ruins because you _died_.  And the TARDIS was left over, just sitting.  _Dying_.  Like you said in your Emergency recording, like you said I should let it.  At the Gamestation, you remember?  Satellite Five?” 

“I remember, Rose.”  He says it slowly, eyes downcast in a kind of mild forbearance that only _looks_ like patience. 

“Well?”  God, the last thing she wants now is to cry.  The last thing she wants to show him is hysteria, if it’s not already too late.  She’s come so far, cast off that old Rose that takes no for an answer, that she can’t, shouldn’t.  That doormat Rose that Mickey left at home to watch matches at the pub, the one that Jimmy Stone dumped flat on her face.  She’s launched across a hundred worlds, marched battlefields, sat for hours describing the concept of void stuff and nanogenes and Dalekanium-polycarbide supermetal to Torchwood scientists. She’s seen the end of the world and the prosperity of a new Earth, she’s danced on the deck of a spaceship in the middle of the London blitz in 1941 and met Charles Dickens and Queen Victoria, she’s fallen in love with the same man as two different people and she’s lived a life in a foreign universe, but her voice cracks, buckles like a bridge under too much weight, as though _this_ is the thing that’s just too much. 

She paws at her face, wiping tears and mascara, pressing the heel of her hands against the globes of her eyes until the darkness behind them erupts in what looks like stars.  In all the time she’d spent in this universe, crying had come at the strangest intervals.  At a desk in Torchwood Three, in the middle of a training field test, reading a textbook sometime past midnight, twice randomly in a locked zeppelin bathroom for nothing more than the familiar subliminal hum of the engines.  Once the flight attendant had knocked on the door, asking her to return to her seat.  Jackie had told her, later on, the flight attendant was the nosy type, and she’d probably heard sounds--thought she was joining the mile high club in the restroom stall.  Rose hadn’t asked how she’d come to the conclusion or even had the idea because frankly-- 

“Oh my _God_.” 

She says it before he can even reply to her earlier question, whatever kind of answer she really could have expected.  He’s only just looked up when the words leap out of her mouth, cracking in the air between them while he stares, looking withdrawn and helpless, a bit angry and so distractingly beautiful that she wants to look away.  He blinks in a bright ribbon of morning sunlight, and she doesn’t pay attention because she can’t.  Instead, she shakes her head a little while she talks, trying to quell her panic with action.  “We’re what’s wrong, you said.  We’re out of sync, we fell asleep and we went out of sync or probability or into that...between time...?  And my mum?  She was with us, Doctor.  What about my _mum_?”

And it’s true, his face is all she ever needs to see to know the truth of things.  She can’t remember if it’s always been the case or not.  He’s dumbstruck a second, as though waiting for some kind of great sonic boom following something soundless that has passed overhead.  Jackie isn’t something that had entered his mind until now, and another delayed shape of a word is forming on his mouth before he snaps into motion, never even getting a syllable out before they’re fumbling with the chain-lock and deadbolt.  They’re throwing open the door, barreling into the dim hallways littered with the spectral co-existence of a thousand realities, two things out of place and running, tethered to each other by a shared grip damp with rainwater and anxious human sweat.


	5. Smoke of an Old War

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Doctor,” Rose says again, her voice low, a deep line between her pushed-together eyebrows. The way she vacillates between dispassion and concern is dizzying, but even still, the way she looks at him, all he can remember is how she said he felt like a stranger. Now, she’s talking to him like he’s one. Or a child. Something unstable and dangerous, blood and anger and revenge. And maybe she’s right, but not for the reason she thinks. “You don’t seem well.”

**5:  Smoke of an Old War**

 

He runs, but he’s thinking about superconductivity.  About latent heat and the Meissner effect. Bose-Einstein condensates and blackbody radiation.  About the humid warmth of Rose Tyler’s hand gripping his mid-stride for the first time in what feels like a good century only not really.  

He has a headache that could crack stone.  

He runs, and he’s focused, but he’s not.  All things considered, reasons not to feel deliriously happy would be in short supply if not for the standout detail that Rose is beside herself, which is probably the worst metaphor for anything he’s thought up in a long time.

No, not beside herself.  Anything that implies two of someone only makes things worse inside his aching head.  Hell.  Just _two_ of anything should be the least of his worries with a profusion of uncertainty hanging in the air around him.

The hotel corridors are a disorienting mess of light and sound flickering, changing, fading.  Webs of arms and legs that might well be _people_ appear and vanish, stretching and blurring along their potential pathways.  Everything with the wobble of uncertainty, multiple states existing, cancelling out, reforming.  There are sconces along the corridor walls, art deco fans made of amber glass that are both shining and shattered, studded along the ivory brocade wallpaper that is satiny and newly pasted, peeled and worn, scorched, torn, ripped away to wood framing and drywall, crawling with mold and wrist-thick vines.  The carpet is plush and burned and matted, littered with leaves brought in through the blown out windows. Outside there is a flicker of gray sky, dry lightning through chasms in the walls that are there only if he’s not really looking; whole worlds living in periphery.  Then there is the wobble, the dizzying shift like they’re living in a world of wet paint, and they run, and it’s all as if it was any day in any hotel, nothing out of the ordinary save a man and woman in bare feet running as though the terror of the world is behind them.

The scorched black hull of the burned out version of the hotel corridor is exactly what it feels like inside his skull.

His cranium is pulsating, robbing him of clarity.  Every strike his heels make against the carpet send a shock up his spine to the big cellular library of his brain.  It’s the feeling of a nail being hammered into a wall, the throb of slow war drums.  His heart gallops in his ears and his throat burns and isn’t this body just rubbish.  They round a corner, nearly plunge down a broken shaft that isn’t really there, and Rose swings to catch herself on him, her cheek against his collarbone with her face wet enough with streaming tears to stick and he hates it.  He hates this, all of it, and his thoroughly brilliant morning has turned incontrovertibly sour.

They find Jackie Tyler curled into a fetal ball near a stairwell exit, her back pressed into the corner of the hallway with her mascara tracking dark ribbons down her face, sitting opposite the open door to the suite.  She cries out when she sees Rose, and a quick as that, fast as a sneeze, his hand is empty and Rose is sprinting ahead.  

Her family.  This was what he’d wanted for her.  He’d sent her away, roped that transporter over her neck because her family was leaving and one day, he knew, she would regret not following.  The Doctor specializes in saving others the same kind of remorse that haunts him.  It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, a cycle he’s been caught in almost longer than he can recall anymore, because saving others from a plague of their own bitterness has only ever brought him more of it.

(Because, in that _Moment_ , he hadn’t had the luxury to chose family or duty or loyalty or anything else.  There wasn’t a choice to be made, if he could even pretend to know what he’d have chosen if he even could.  There was just a Great Key and an ignition trigger, a certainty of perpetual violence and ten million Dalek cruisers.)

It doesn’t make it sting less, though, this standing suddenly alone, like being left bobbing in a black ocean.  It’s likely t-minus ten seconds before Jackie is railing him with her arms folded tight and her voice pitched so high dogs would be barking if any are within earshot.  He’s counting ten, nine--

But Jackie doesn’t even look at him.  She wraps herself around Rose in a dearth of sound, shoulders drawing up and dropping in jerking sobs.  From his position, he can make out a gnarled semblance of the word _nightmare_.  Rose rubs her shoulder, the timbre of her voice low enough all he can hear is the resonance, and he’s drifting in that dark ocean.  Abandoned with a splinter in his chest and a certainty that his brain is going to liquefy and run out of his nose.  With one hand, he reaches to catch at the wall, which is solid enough here when he’s looking directly at it.  His peripheral vision is reeling.  

Down the tilting hallway, Jackie’s shoulders pull up--they drop, drop, drop.  She’s really crying now, big raindrop tears that somehow manage to look louder than the storm that’s bellowing outside.  It all sounds like breath, something big and wet and breathing like the walls are alive, a kind of liquid rush like a heartbeat in an ultrasound, or maybe it’s just the tumbling crash of his own erratic pulse that feels strange and unpleasant in his own chest.

He’s counting eight, seven--

He just needs to breathe; he’ll figure this out.  Always does.  A couple minutes reprieve from Rose’s scrutiny so he can think, and it would all be so much easier without the shock of pain just at the base of his skull, everything inside him feeling white hot and hammered out of iron.  That’s the wall at his back, and he’s sliding down in search of equilibrium, something to root himself to, to grip and hang on as everything starts to tilt under him.  

Fast as a muscle twitch, the world’s gone askew, everything’s a reflection from a warped carnival mirror.  Rose and Jackie at the end of the hallway look so far, almost translucent, their legs spider-long and curving, bending unnaturally, their voices lost in the roar of blood and rain and the grinding churn of everything moving toward chaos.

Hands to his head, hair still wet under his clutching fingers, he’s counting six, five--

It’s not a hangover.  Seconds before, his hand anchored to Rose’s, he’d been fine.  Headachy, certainly, it had hit him hard once they’d left the general stability of their hotel room, its walls inexplicably anchored more soundly around them than this.  Upon waking, his attention had been utterly monopolized by Rose, but even then he’d taken quick note that his innate sense of moving time was tomb-silent, a howling hole left in his consciousness.  He’d had (still has) utterly no concept of the time, not even the remotest sense of it being winter or summer or morning or night, like waking groggy from a long afternoon nap and mistaking dusk for dawn, except it’s more like waking in February and expecting August.

Like a void ship--no atomic mass, no electromagnetic field.  Something with utterly no presence.  It’s how time feels: nonexistent. The soulless ticking of that vast-primordial clock buried in his instincts has gone disquietingly silent as though time is just an idea, something pretend; something he’s been making up his entire life.  A delusion of which he’s woken up to find himself cured.

This conglomerates in his stomach, withering nausea flattening him to the floor, the high-pile carpet brand new and scorched and littered with phantom detritus.  How he’s feeling is _diminished_.  How he’s feeling is smaller and smaller.

It’s all so obvious right now, how a body works.  Burning fuel, creating energy, heat, his muscles cramping and pulling to bend his limbs, the squeeze-relax of his pitiful single heart forcing blood through his veins, oxygen pulling into his lungs that feel so tight and so small.  How a skeleton is just something that tissue of the ground.  How flesh is just meat, how ideas and knowledge and love are just chemical reactions and electrical impulses.

And he’s counting four, three--

His body’s coming apart, every organ and cell betraying him.  His brain turning into soup, a headache upgraded into a warzone, it’s the feeling of his skull being split with a pickaxe, everything so hot and blinding that his flesh is melting off his bones like candle wax.   He wants to call out, make a sound, to form a word, _any damn word_ , but only manages an inarticulate groan.

The world is long gone.  It wasn’t supposed to be like this.  Here he’d been thinking the universe had slipped up and dropped a gift in his lap, and now he’s dying alone with not even enough time for his life to flash before his eyes.  Instead, all that comes to mind is a memory of not so long before, lying on the cold floor of a hospital on Earth’s single bone-white moon, just shy of disappointed that Martha Jones had managed to resuscitate him.

(He’s not counting anymore.)

No, there are other memories, faces, not with any reason to their order.  Donna. Romana.  Ace.  Irving.  Sarah Jane.  Grace.  Susan.  Rose.   

“ _Doctor_!” the word swims up out of the dark, a fish surfacing from a murky lake.  The fish has Rose’s face, with her eyes hazy, everything about her that used to be pink--lips, the wet rims of her eyes--turned violet, everything double-exposure like bad film. The moment her hands are on him, pressing and warm, the nausea lifts like fog, there is oxygen and he can breathe again.  

“What’s the matter with him?”  Jackie’s strained voice finds his ears; he’s too dizzy to look up.  Eyes shut, he sucks air in and out, mouth breathing.

Maybe it’s just like this, being part-human, but there’s no word that comes to mind out of a massive vocabulary eight-billion-languages deep to describe just how pathetic he feels, sweating and shivering and Rose petting his hair like a sick child.  

“Doctor,” Rose prompts, sounding patient and kind and _concerned_.  Apparently it’s something she can turn on like a switch; she’d been snapping at him only a few minutes before.  “What’s wrong, tell me what to do.”

“I’m fine,” he says, muffled against her shoulder, and he is.  He’s fine, the vertigo is subsiding, the nausea ebbing away as though it was never there.  The headache recedes only slightly, but he can see out from under it again, smell the powdery candy-orange scent of Rose’s soap, the salt from her skin, a kind of waxy-sweet smell of maybe body lotion or hair conditioner.  Almonds.  Cherries.  Something grounding and real, something that reminds him vaguely of breakfast pastries, something that makes his galloping heart begin to calm.

“I felt sick,” Jackie is saying, voice wobbly and gummed up from her crying.  “This morning, first thing.  I woke up, and I was sick, on the ground just like that.  First I was thinking, not this again--”

“Mum, please.”  

“Well, I _dunno_ \--is he normally dropping down sick like that?  There was that once, I know, on Christmas, but apart from that--”

“How should _I_ know?”  Those words have sharp edges.  He wants to correct her that she damn well should know, thank you very much, Rose Tyler, but instead he swallows back a disconcerting surge of saliva which hints ominously that his body is planning on throwing up the absolutely nothing he’s managed to feed it apart from bourbon.   It doesn’t take a genius to work out why he feels like this.  The rapid onset had thrown him rather substantially for a loop is all.

“I’m fine,” he says again, steeling himself before firmly pushing back, hefting himself up with help from the wall.  “Really.  Fine.  I don’t know what happened.”  He swallows back the burning in his throat, taking measured, long breaths while Rose’s hands land lightly on his shoulders like nervous birds.  “Jackie, have you seen Pete?”

Her eyes are pink, housed in swollen skin smudged gray with yesterday’s cosmetics.  “Aren’t you going to tell me what’s happening?”

“Jackie--”

“I don’t _know_ who or _what_ I’ve seen,”  she bites into that last word, drawing it out, her enunciation suffering from all the strain.  “I woke up and he’d gone, but he wasn’t--I could hear him.  Heard the shower running, bathroom mirrors all fogged up like, but he’s...not. And _it’s_ not, and...then I looked out the window.  I just went a little mad.  I got out of the room, and--”  her voice snags up coming out of her throat, it catches and tears, chin dimpling under the effort not to dissolve into more tears.  “Whatever’s happening, Doctor, tell me you can _fix it_.”

“I promise,”  The Doctor reaches for her shoulders, low and a somehow bit more narrow than he remembers.  “I’m working on it.  Think of it like, oh I dunno, you know those old television sets.  1950’s, 60’s--you had those rabbit ear tuners to fetch the signal out of the air, yeah?  Bend them around to clear up the signal, until the picture was clear.”

Jackie nods slowly.  Rose is no doubt thinking of old cathode-ray tellies for sale at only five quid, Mr. Magpie and fourteen hours without a face and maybe that frightening moment in the corridor afterward with his arms around her, when he’d nearly done something to her but even now he’s not certain what.  

(That’s a familiar line, he’d fed it to himself regularly in the past.  _Yeah? Get her in bed with you. Show her just how much you really don’t know._ )

Rose is watching him closely during his vacant-eyed pause, those lips from a French perfume advert in a fashion magazine hanging slightly open, the pearl ridge of her teeth behind.  They’re a bit puckered, dry.  She licks them and he watches more intently than he wants, there’s a pain in his chest that echoes in his skull like a reply.  All at once, there it is: the shame reflex.  He turns his eyes somewhere safer.  As though this is the time for any of this.  

“Sometimes, though, you know, the tuning would go south,” he continues, focusing, “You’d be getting more than one channel at once, interference, they’d kind of _bleed_ over each other, multiple programmes on all at once?”

Buttermilk sallow, Jackie Tyler nods.   

“That’s it, Jackie, what’s going on. Just...multiple realities instead of television channels.  And _we’re_ the broken tuner.  We’re seeing everything as it is in every version of this particular causal nexus that’s relative to us.”

“But...” she sputters,  “What for?”  What she doesn’t ask is _why us_.  Because she knows.  She knows, it’s because of the Doctor, because of him, somehow, one way or another, it’s always because of him.  It’s a feeling he’s so tired of having to ignore.  

He pulls in a long breath.  “It’s hard to know for sure.  But when the Earth was moved, it was taken out of time sync, the same as all the planets.  They hid them in the Medusa Cascade, all of it taken a second out of sync with ordinary chronology to hide the matter resonance from detection.  You weren’t there when...maybe you didn’t know.  Either way, the magnetron broke, we had to move the Earth back physically.  But it was never resynced.  A body so large will do it on its own eventually, time flux will account for the gravity,” he’s speaking quickly enough it’s certain Jackie’s barely hearing a word, it’s all rushing out, water from a sluice gate.  He brings up a hand, pushes his thumb and forefinger against his eyes, shakes his head.  

“Doesn’t matter.  The point is, we, everyone on the TARDIS, they went back to that same Earth.  Their synchronicity will reassert itself with the rest of the Earth.  But us, Jackie, our bodies, our actual _physical bodies_.  When we came here, we were being observed, our mass was given shape because something in this world knew it was here, even if it was just us, watching each other, or just being aware of ourselves.”

Jackie doesn’t say anything.  Her face doesn’t even change.  It’s unsettling.

“Then we fell asleep.  In that state, you aren’t observing reality, matter, not anything.  You don’t interact with spacetime in any capacity when you can’t observe it, it exists in multiple states.  But _us_.  Nothing in this reality can observe us while we’re asynchronous with it, maybe because we’re not recognized as having originated here, we didn’t naturally resync with the particle resonance, so--”

“Doctor,” she interrupts, mouth opening  to deliver that invective he’d been counting down earlier, just a bit late.  He expects fury and instead gets a plea thick with unshed tears.  “I need to see my son.  My husband!  I...we can’t be... _trapped_ between _channels_!”

“And you won’t be.  You won’t be, I _promise_.  We need to be calibrated, think of it that way and leave it to me.  But I don’t have any equipment, not even my screwdriver.  I’ll need--”

Behind her mother, Rose is digging in her pocket, withdrawing her wrist-mount communicator with an almost ardent flourish.  Differentiating between her painstakingly crafted professional resolve and actual enthusiasm is becoming difficult, and he’s only been awake twenty minutes.  “The cannon,” she says, pursing her lips a moment, maybe that’s her tongue going over her teeth.  “I still have the jump-disk, in my jacket.  Mum, you must have yours too.  If I can ring control--”

From the communicator speaker, there’s a blast of grinding static.  On reflex, the Doctor grabs at his own skull, one eye squeezing shut against the bone-piercing screech.  Jackie’s palms fly to her ears.

Rose tries again, twists knobs while shaking her head at the device.  “This could transmit through dimensional walls before, even after the Earth was moved.  So we were already out of sync and I could still talk to Torchwood.  Why wouldn’t it still work?”

“If I could modify the RF bandwidth sweep--”  

Her eyebrows jump.  “...but no screwdriver?”  

“Yes, but I didn’t get out of there with empty pockets, either.  I _have_ gotten along without one before, if you want to know.”  He doesn’t mean to sound petulant.  He feels a little petulant.  Maybe it’s just the headache.  He’s been through worse than this.  He’s certain he has.

“Then--”   For the first time, really, he’s noticing that her face is not quite the same as before.  Until now, he’s been so caught up in the idea that he gets to look at it again, that it’s there, in front of him.  But it is--different--just slightly.  Maybe it’s the expression, the spareness of her once easy smile, the missing trace of laughter pinching the corners of her eyes, tugging on the corners of her mouth.  The remaining soft edges of innocence have been knocked off; during her time here, she’s made herself into something hard, something sharp.  

“ _Is that what you did to her?_ ” Donna asks on a streetfront in his memory, watching Martha run back across the street toward the assembled U.N.I.T. team.  “ _Made her a soldier?_ ”

(“ _You keep insisting you’re not a soldier, but look at you..._ ”)

Probably it goes without saying, he’s not quite how she remembers either.  On a long enough timeline, the only constant is change.   

Then she smiles, just a bit, and she’s the same again, the same doe-eyed, bottle blonde Rose, perfume-ad lips and fingernails chewed short.  Rose who simultaneously made him feel both sanctified and dirty; who gave him more peace with little touches of her hands and open-mouthed laughter than she had when she’d ended the Time War with a breath of life.  Rose who’d promised a forever she didn’t have and built a dimension cannon to chase back the darkness, because somewhere along the way she had become someone who didn’t just let things happen to her while she sat and watched.  

Different and the same all at once.  It’s not that it’s an unfamiliar concept.  He should know it better than most.  

“Dimension cannon,” he says aloud,  sudden and sharp, and the wind outside responds.  It moans and claws at the walls (except maybe it doesn’t) and Rose wrinkles her forehead at him.

“I literally just said that a minute ago.”

“I know--”  He shakes his head, then regrets it.  “Rose, the cannon, the actual control base, where is it?”

“Under Torchwood, at Canary Wharf, third sub-basement level with water access.”

“What?  Why not Cardiff?”  It’s less than ideal, but then, being in Norway makes anything but Norway less than ideal for what he has in mind.

“It has better access to a water inlet, is why.  It’s built in a reactor-casing, the heat-syncs are cooled by recirculated river water.  It runs hot, because of the amount of energy it creates during the discharge,” she pulls her bottom lip into her mouth, gives a one-shouldered shrug, eyes flicking toward her bare feet.  She always sounds a bit mumbly when she’s explaining anything scientific; like she’s certain she’s got it wrong even when she hasn’t.  That, at least, is exactly the same.  So is the pride he feels when she even tries.  “Nearly went into meltdown first time we tested it.  Even the jump-disks have to cool and recharge between jumps.”

“Meltdown,” And oh, he feels slapped in the face by that word and everything it implies.  His tongue suddenly feels like wood.  Heavy and foreign in his mouth.  “It’s nuclear?”

“ _Well_ ,” she demurs familiarly, and it coaxes out an involuntary smile from her that he now has no impulse to return.  “No.  It has it’s own inertial fission engine...”

“Honestly, why _not_ Cardiff?  Rift energy would have been far more efficient, to say nothing of safety--”  

“There is no rift.  Not here, not in this world.  If there is, it’s not given itself away, never been opened enough to be detectable.  The Gelth have never been to this Earth, there’s nothing there, not even a Torchwood branch.”

He nods, feeling no less startled by this revelation than by the concept that Torchwood would allow anyone, but especially Rose, to interface with quasi-nuclear technology.  

“And you went through that?  Inertial fisson-powered particle engines, and they just _let you_ walk right into it?”  He doesn’t want to get shouty; he can already feel it building up.  It’s anxiety, not a little, and sometimes it makes his voice volume ramp up higher than he means.  It’s been a difficult morning, dealing with a new circadian clock and hormones and inferior inner ear mechanisms that are still providing him with mild swoops of possibly hangover-related vertigo.  Dealing with visible potentiality condensates and a missing time-sense and Rose shifting from hot to cold so quickly if he hadn’t been dizzy enough already he’d be spinning.  How quickly he’s forgotten that it wasn’t five minutes before that he’d genuinely feared he was near death.

“Sweetheart,” Jackie says, knotting her hands.  She’s pale, a little shine to her forehead that wasn’t there before.  She’s not feeling her best either.

“You went through it too, Jackie, they let you go.” He doesn’t bring up Mickey, gone to them once more.  The emotions are high enough as it is, he’s learned that much, but it doesn’t stop the diatribe that’s collecting behind his teeth.  The outrage boiling in his gut.

“Why would that be important just now?” Rose’s got her arms folded, right over her chest, and he kind of wants to shake her.  His palms itch and yes, he wants to touch her but refrains.  Same old game, new rules.

“Particle engines, I should have known they’d have that kind of technology pocketed away.  Bloody Torchwood.  It’s how they opened the void, after all, isn’t it?  Particle engines fired at the weak spot.  Built a tower to reach the spatial disturbance and--”

“Doctor,”  she reaches, her palm on his bare bicep, fingers curling.  On impulse, he tugs it away.

Because his mind is back in the void room at Canary Wharf.  He’s still resting his palm against a white wall in some kind of moment of grieving, clinging to a lingering presence that maybe he’d invented in his mind.  Because, to the Doctor, it always had taken a few moments when Rose left a room before all of her was gone.  Maybe perhaps he’d always regarded her that way, as having a kind of halo around her, the way things do when they are borrowed and fleeting and too-good-to-be-kept.  That halo, it went out of the void room like a shadow passing in front of the sun.  Like something draining away, just leaving an old emptiness behind.

He’d tried to send her away because it was the noble thing, the altruistic thing, and she’d calmly looked back while he’d snarled at her, practically spitting, trying to pry open her eyes so she could see what she was choosing to lose forever.  What he was trying to give her.  Because once someone had told him love was selfless, even though only now did he really understand that the impulses that go with it are _not_.

It was the choice he hadn’t been able to make, that last day of the war.  As though making that choice for Rose Tyler, saving her from losing everyone important to her would somehow balance something out.  

( _And that’s how you live with yourself_.)

She’d looked at him then the same way she was looking at him now, calm in the face of a brewing storm.  He remembers, it was that moment that he’d first understood.  Really understood.  His whole body had gone silent.  Turned to stone, very still and silent, the eye of a hurricane.

He’d might as well have gotten kicked in the gut.  Because it wasn’t that he hadn’t known it.  

That she loved him.  That he loved her.  It hung in the air between them every day, ignored and forgotten like the smoke of an old war, and they’d squinted through it, pretending not to see.  

And he’d wanted it.  Wanted it, wanted it, oh please, _please_ , wanted it so much it physically, properly hurt.  Less a sledgehammer to the chest and more a creeping ache, an insistent throbbing like an overworked muscle.  Like something growing inside him; a weed, gradually strangling him, tighter and tighter every day until he couldn’t breathe. 

It had evoked an anger response at the time, staring it all head on.  Because he’s the one that runs away.  

It wasn’t ten minutes later that she was gone, and the only howling void that remained was the one reopened inside him.  And he hadn’t cried.  Not until later.  

“ _Doctor_ ,” Rose says again, her voice low, a deep line between her pushed-together eyebrows.  The way she vacillates between dispassion and concern is dizzying, but even still, the way she looks at him, all he can remember is how she said he felt like a stranger.  Now, she’s talking to him like he’s one.  Or a child.  Something unstable and dangerous, blood and anger and revenge.  And maybe she’s right, but not for the reason she thinks.  “You don’t seem well.”

“I’m fine,” he tells her, and turns, keeping his eyes anywhere but on her face. Because looking at her makes him feel helpless and empty and increasingly punished the way maybe the Other had wanted after all.  Any moment of empathy he’d spared for him over the last day, he wants to take back and spend them thinking of something, someone--anyone--else.  He doesn’t have that time to spare anymore, after all.  But he’s not beaten.  This time that’s left to him, it’s _his_ , even if she doesn’t want to share it with him.  Even if she’s decided against him.  And how all this feels he doesn’t have a decent word to describe.  Eight-billion languages and nothing even comes to mind.

What’s important is they need to get to the control base at Torchwood.  He wants to see that dimension cannon with its inertial-fission engine and reactor shell and its likely multi-million joule discharge spike.  What’s important is, he thinks he knows exactly how it works; what it does. Because maybe this isn’t _just_ about time asynchronicity.  

(Maybe none of this is what she wants.)

The Doctor swallows tightly, extending a hand to take the communicator from Rose, roiling with formless animosity, head gripped in the slowly inflating pain, choking, feeling strangled by that creeping ache that’s still inside him even now, his skin feeling raw and new and everything a little on fire. 

“Really.  _Honestly_ ,” he lies.  “Fine.”

 


	6. Force of Nature

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Excerpt: "It startles him, jerks him out of a bizarre reverie like a hooked fish and he flounders for consciousness, still half-submerged in the claustrophobic heat of a hallucination. How long he’d lain there, he couldn’t be certain. It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes, but at the same time there was the fatigued certainty that it had been hours, hours spent anxious and dizzy with exhaustion and frustration and a kind of mournful howling emptiness, an echo calling out with no one to reply; an allegory for his entire life."

**6:  Force of Nature**

He’s cannibalized the clock radio in the Tyler’s suite for its transistors, daisy chained them, hardwire-looped them back to the diodes in Rose’s wrist-comm.  A jeweler’s screwdriver and tweezers from Jackie’s purse have helped compile the mess, the wire bits that are left over litter the high-pile carpeting below his tented knees.  He’s twisting exposed copper ends with his bare fingers, modifying couplings, dismantling the circuitry to rebuild it in a different arrangement.

It’s important to keep busy.  It’s important to keep focused, fingers moving; important not to dwell on anything that is not relevant to broadening the device’s net wideband frequency sweep.  It’s something he’s found to be progressively difficult because the longer they sit, like water over an open flame, the more he  _boils_.

He’s furious.  Irate.  Incensed.  And other synonyms.

He’s done it to himself, he knows that.   He’s just not sure how to handle it now that he has.  Historically, he could win awards for compartmentalization.   _Trophies_.  Now he’s fuming on a hotel floor in a liminal temporal pocket in a parallel world, coupling wires with tweezers just for a chance to grasp at some straws, and out of all these decidedly poor circumstances, he’s livid at what’s really nothing by comparison.

Somehow he never fails to be at least half-amazed at the places he ends up.

Why he’s reacting so badly, and at what exactly, he can’t explain.   Admittedly, some of it is Rose’s irresolute see-sawing, speaking to him like they’ve barely met instead of having once been nearly inseparable.  As though they hadn’t been torn apart once, hadn’t mournfully bid each other farewell while he sacrificed a white-dwarf-star as a power conduit, as though she hadn’t fought tooth and nail through innumerable parallels to find him.  As though they hadn’t woken up in bed together only a short time before, her mouth and her hips moving against his shortly thereafter before things had deteriorated bizarrely between them.   Instead, she’d been talking to him like somebody’s volatile, unpredictable child--and how typical--he only has himself to thank for her believing it.  He always has been his own worst enemy.

(“ _Remind you of someone?_ ”)

Because he’d just had to drive a wedge shaped like himself between them.  Out of pride or out of self-loathing, a challenge to himself to win her over a third time.  He should have known those words had barbs on them.  That they were meant to wound.

He knows this because he’d have done the same.  It’s nothing he’s proud of.

None of this is the matter at hand.

He couples two wires tight with the tweezers, transfers the instrument to his mouth while he uses both hands to fit in the wired diode.  This would be so much easier, so much more efficient with a sonic.  Even something resembling proper equipment.  It would be easier if he could just concentrate.

Out of the corner of his eye, Jackie lies with Rose on the bed.  Rose murmurs to her, their heads together almost conspiratorially, glancing over at intervals.  It feels like years have passed before he catches sight of her legs swinging over the edge and carrying her over to where he’s sitting against the wall, surrounded by wire filaments and nipped insulation ends in the undulating silver light from the window.  When she sinks down beside him, he keeps his head down, watching his work with unnecessary intensity.

She says, “I’m sorry.”

And maybe she is, but it doesn’t help.  He gives a soundless nod, plucks out another diode, untangles the trailing wires.

“I haven’t been fair.  Or very clear.  I know that, and I  _am_ , I’m sorry.”

She hasn’t been either of those things, and he’s been intent on not taking it personally.  Or blaming her for it.  He’s failing rather fantastically at both.

“Why did you ask me why I drowned?”

He hadn’t intended to ask because he hadn’t wanted to know.  But it’s been hovering there at the back of his mind, prodding him, demanding to be addressed because why would she ask as though he would have an answer?

She makes a wet sound when she licks her lips, shaking her head in his peripheral now as though she knows how ridiculous a suggestion it is that he might have had an explanation.  Still when she replies, it’s a non-answer.  “It happened too fast, they said.  You couldn’t regenerate.  They brought up the body, and...I was there.  I saw you dead.  I was at UNIT when they did the autopsy.”

Probably it’s shock that makes him drop the tweezers.  The silence is the loudest one in history, and he would know.  It’s something you could choke on.

With her sitting beside him, backs to the wall, her shoulder bumps his as she shrugs to the question he hasn’t asked yet.  Like it’s something to shrug about, this uncertainty about why she’d stayed to watch them cut him up.  Maybe now she wants to talk about how he’d looked inside.   Maybe she wants to ask how much of what she saw is the same as the body he’s in now, and really, it’s almost a relief that he doesn’t know and couldn’t answer properly even if he’d wanted.

All his long life and in every body he’s been ectothermic, and in general, this makes it that much stranger that he’s absolutely sweating.   _Sweating_.  Sitting barefoot in a damp t-shirt, he’s sweating.  Maybe it’s nerves, but something inside is fighting to regulate temperature without explicit instructions to do so the way his personal biochemistry has always functioned in any body.  Despite an environment that feels distinctly cold on his bare skin, he’s sweating like...he doesn’t know what like. Something that sweats.

Heat is his enemy in this body, in all its forms.  When he’d kissed her, there had been a heat behind it he somehow hadn’t known to expect.  A kind of glowing ember starting somewhere near the base of his spine, blooming into a creeping, clutching burn under every inch of his skin.

“Mum’s asleep,” she says, by way of a tangent, and doesn’t she think she’s so clever.  He throws her a sidelong glance while he reaches to pick up the tweezers from the carpet, reminding her wordlessly that she learned that trick from him.

“I shouldn’t have asked, it was stupid.  As though you’d have an answer  _why_.”

He nods; she doesn’t elaborate any further.

The Doctor pushes out a sharp laugh; it almost hurts coming out.  “And you just stood and watched them dissect me, did you?”

“I didn’t bloody watch, Doctor.  I said I was  _there,_ in the building!”

He twists wires and breathes slowly, hands and eyes to himself.  Maybe he’s just inventing reasons to be angry, rushing into everything, trying to squeeze a quickie existential crisis in between misunderstandings and reality shifts.

Rose reaches, her hands close around one of his and pulls it forward.  She looks at it intently while she talks, instead of looking him in the eye.  Because at least the hand, he supposes, is a part of the Doctor that isn’t a stranger.

“Working on the cannon wasn’t the only thing I’ve done since I...came here…you know.  Didn’t get much of a chance to say. I did lots of things.  Got my A-levels, to start.  University programs.  Torchwood field training, EMT, medical certifications, weapons, marksmanship.  It made me feel better.  Like I was, I dunno,  _accomplishing_ something, working toward something important.”  Rose shakes her head, a little inclination side to side.  “The engineers were working on the cannon, they already had a lot of the technology with the dimension jumpers.  I’d done, I dunno what you’d call it, consulting I suppose.  I volunteered to go through, you know, when it as working, but...I just don’t want you to think that I sat there every day, waiting and doing nothing but...try to find new ways to bust through the walls no matter how dangerous...”  She trails off with another shrug, this one almost exaggerated while she turns his hand over in hers, drags her fingertips over the creases in his palm like she can divine the future there.  Life lines, head lines, heart lines, because what means nothing can mean anything.

He hadn’t ever imagined her sitting, waiting, trying to claw through the dimensional membranes despite his warnings, but there’s a powerfully contrary part of him that wants to ask what it would matter if he had.  It’s given that his expertise in this arena is woefully lacking, but he thinks that would probably mean something.  After all, she addresses him as though he’s the same Doctor she’s always known.  It’s only that she can’t quite decide if she believes it.   She’d stood between the two of him, looked them both in the eye.  He’s told her about starfish and plant clippings and asexual propagation, energy-based lifeforms and bodies as vessels, like a glass holding water in a useable shape.  About languages and words falling so, so short of what, had she been properly telepathic, he could have just  _shown_ her.

But there is an empty feeling in his head, a vacancy not limited to his absent sense of time, a headache so enormous and far-reaching and complete, he can feel it in age old memories.  He swallows a knot in his throat and says nothing at all.

“Once it started responding, the cannon I mean, I felt like...I knew why it was so important to build it. Everything I’d been working toward.  Defending the Earth,” He can hear a familiar smile lost somewhere in those last words, but it’s gone before he can glimpse it on her face.  “Even if it wasn’t  _my_  Earth.”

She goes on after a moment, easing back against the wall and still studying the map of his palm.  “Might’ve seen a hundred worlds in the first day.  Some so different I couldn’t recognize a thing and...some of them so  _identical_ I never did figure out the differences, but the readings were never right.  Donna’s world came the closest, all the BE-variances were zeroing in on her.  That’s what they said--couldn’t tell you what that means even if I knew.”

“Bose-Einstein variances.  Variables from two or more solidified quantum condensates in stasis.”  His voice sounds strange even to his own ears, a bit hollow.  She gives a vague nod, sucks in a labored little breath.  In the absence of words, he can almost hear himself sweating.  The air feels like cold honey around them, a tension that exists only in the locked off reality held together by their clasped hands.

“Yeah.  Variables.  We followed Donna’s lines, located where the anomaly presented itself, came all that way, and,” Rose pulls in a breath, big, hitching and slow like she’s going to blow out birthday candles, then lets it out slowly before continuing.  “And you were dead.  I’d...we’d all worked so hard, trying to find you, to  _warn you_ \--and, I just...I got a bit obsessed with setting it right.  Undoing that entire timeline.  I didn’t sleep for days.  Didn’t eat.  Because I’d...come so far and...I couldn’t shake the idea that it was my fault.  That if I hadn’t tried to come at all, you would’ve lived.”

She’s still gripping him, the heat of her hands clutching his, stilling his movement, her fingers tucked against the saddle of his thumb.   She’s staring at nothing, eyes pointed downward, not so much looking at their awkwardly braided fingers or the pulled apart communicator as avoiding looking up.

“Rose, I  _did_ live.”

“But not without Donna,” she whispers.  “Not without her down there with you.”

And in some universe it was true.  One day without Rose and he’d regressed so far, murdering a billion hungry Racnoss juveniles, filling their tracheal air sacs with the Thames, a hundred-million gallons of it.  Too much for any hydrophobic exoskeleton to save them.  For anything to save them, not even his own fairweather sense of mercy.  The truth is, he barely can remember any of that day, much less his own thought processes.  He might as well have been running on an automatic setting.

(But he’ll never accept that his default setting is killer.)

“How could it be your fault?  Donna was trapped there, without you, she’d have just lived that life to its end, sitting there in that tent on Shan-Shen with that beetle feeding away on all that potential unfulfilled...”  He can’t help it, his voice snags on that last word, like a loose sleeve on a nail sticking out of a doorway.  It hitches and breaks, and Rose blinks at him while he clears his throat conspicuously.

She fidgets in his peripheral for a long moment, before deflecting.  “You should have seen her face when she could finally see that thing; that beetle.”

“Just about can,” he says softly.  And he can, really.  The way her eyes would look, watery and blue, a biting word hissing through teeth, the jerking inclination of her head as punctuation.   Donna Noble, consigned to a life day after day, never knowing that the machinery of the universe was grinding away silently inside her head.  Never remembering that an innumerable multitude of galaxies and super clusters, suns and worlds and star systems and  _existence itself_ endured because she had burned brilliant and blinding for the right moment.

“ _But you’re talking like…destiny.”_   Donna had said, saved from one fire and not yet burning with the next. _“There’s no such thing.  Is there?”_

He’d been too distracted to answer at the time.  Because no, there is no such thing.  Not destiny, not fate.  The ugly truth of time and space is that even free will is, at best, an illusion of linear minds.  Decisions, potentials; because everything viable exists, perception is limited by organic matter, whether for Time Lords and Daleks or Schrödinger’s cat.  But lives change, empires begin their descent, the greatest of wars pivot on the fulcrum of a single moment.  And the brightest stars burn only briefly.

“She was terrified,” Rose continues, looking fond but restraining a smile, examining the mountain range of their knuckles and cold, now basketwoven fingers.  “But even then, you know, she didn’t let it get the best of her.  She’s brave, Donna.  Doesn’t think much of herself.  Well, not then, anyway, before Doctor-Donna and all.  Different now, I expect.”

The Doctor tries to smile.  It hurts.  He doesn’t want to talk anymore about Donna.

“She kept saying she’d never done anything important.  That she wasn’t anything special.  And look what she became.”  She seems to consider her next words, head tilting to the side, eyes closing a second while her eyebrows jump on her forehead, the words on her waiting tongue must taste like vinegar.  “I’m glad she’s with him.”

There’s an invitation in there somewhere that he doesn’t take.  He pulls in a breath, licks his lips.  The longer he waits to tell her, the harder it will be.  “Rose.  About...about Donna...”

She glances up expectantly and the wrist-comm howls a muffled mouthful of static against his thigh.  He flips it over, turning the modulator slowly, face tight with concentration, the focus of the moment immediately shifted.

“ _DRF-sweep to 406, 71, 642, attempt fourteen, Big Bad Wolf, respond._ ”

“Hah!”   He has an absurd impulse to high-five her, but abstains in a display of restraint he finds, frankly, admirable.  It hasn’t been the best day and a moment of enthusiastic celebration has long been a favorite coping mechanism.   

Tucking loose hair behind her ears, Rose extends her hands, opens and closes her fingers for the communicator and he taps the delicate rise of her knuckles with the leather wrist strap, holding it just past her arm’s length with a grin that hopefully doesn’t look as put-on as it feels.

“Do I get to be Little Red Riding Hood?”

“Maybe if we buy you some ginger hair tint, yeah.  Give it here!”

She crawls over him, reaching, earning a grunt and a mild, only vaguely-verbal protest from the Doctor before she’s gracelessly clambered half in his lap and taken possession of the communicator.  Punching down the broadcast button with the thumb of her right hand, she keeps the other braced against his shoulder, straight armed, holding herself upright with one knee planted on either side of his hips.  “Control, this is Big Bad Wolf,” she huffs breathlessly, “I copy.”

“Grandmother, what big knees you have,” the Doctor wheezes, and finally she smiles, face pink, and that wooden faced Soldier-Rose has vanished once more.  Her teeth flash and all at once it’s a long-lost sunny day in his mind while she nudges his ribcage with her bent leg, dropping more of her weight on him, prompting an exaggerated groan. She moves her hand from its perch on his bony shoulder to his face, the pad of her left thumb against his lips, and she mimes the word “shush” as the radio-voice blurts out of the device in her grasp.

_“Big Bad Wolf, this is Control 4-3.  Your tracker reads out of range, what is your 20?”_

“Bergen, Norway,” she says, but her eyes on his face, and for no reason at all, he’s self-conscious.  He can feel her eyes on him like sunlight on his skin, like a fever.  “Same place I’ve been, but listen, something’s wrong, the world--everything--it’s like, Doctor, what’d you call it--?”

He only raises his eyebrows, pushing his lips gently against her silencing digit with a pointed raise of his eyebrows.  There’s a silent smile, a nose wrinkle, then she slides her thumb to the side in a way that feels a bit more slowly than the situation heralds.  When he speaks, it’s into the  curve of her palm, one he’s never openly inspected for predictions any more than he’d had opportunity to find constellations in the freckles he’s imagined on her back.  “Quantum superposition of timelines relative to our position in the relative causal nexus possibly due to time asynchronicity but nonetheless amplified by a dissonance in the frequency of our particle resonance.”

_“The Doctor is with you?”_

“Yes...well...yes.   _Listen_ , did you hear what he said ‘cos I can’t repeat it.  We need teleportation to TWHQ, can you update your tracker now that we’re in touch?”

_“Stand by.”_

With a huff, she sits back, shifting the weight off her knees, and the Doctor grunts.  It earns him another smile that rattles something at the back of his brain, a rustling like bird wings in the dark, and oh, the heat is back so quickly.  This body’s androgens are so frustratingly beyond his control. One little tussle, a tiny, thrilling little shift of her hips and he’s gripped with what feels like an outright sinister brand of ardor that’s shivering under his skin like a crawling carpet of ants.  It’s strange, unnatural to him, a completely new force of nature, as foreign as though he’d only today been introduced to gravity.  Never has a feeling so gripped him by the roots of the hair and dragged him into this raw place where he has absolutely no defenses and while he’s not strictly certain, he has a feeling however he looks now is probably nothing to be proud about.

It wasn’t ten minutes ago he was fuming, but he’s always been mercurial.  These little constants have a way of providing comfort in the absence of time and reason and self-restraint.

 _“Refreshing has not produced a clear signal. Your coordinates are haywire.  Big Bad Wolf, can you activate the jump-disk?_ ”

Rose tilts deliciously in his lap, glancing down at him briefly with a flick of her eyelashes before standing.  His brain protests even as he stays silent, watching her turn to round the corner to the sitting room, so utterly absorbed with the motion of her hips and the curve of her lower back that it’s devastatingly clear for a moment, like being run down by a train.

Just a few threads of human DNA, and now what he’s suffered through in the past is nothing,  _nothing_ compared with what’s coming.

“Let me grab Mum’s,” she’s saying, walking.  She disappears around the corner, her hips leading the way, and he watches, driven to distraction, head still buzzing with his almost-hangover, ringing and echoing like bees are chasing themselves around the inside of his hollow skull.   Just as quickly as it had before, a rush of the same vertigo that gripped him in the corridor has its invisible noose looped back around his neck, tugging him downward.  He’s already gasping, dizzy, stricken with debilitating nausea, sliding sideways down the wall to lain on his side, and just as quickly he’s brought out of his torpor by the sound of something crashing in the next room.

It startles him, jerks him out of a bizarre reverie like a hooked fish and he flounders for consciousness, still half-submerged in the claustrophobic heat of a hallucination.  How long he’d lie there, he couldn’t be certain.  It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes, but at the same time there was the fatigued certainty that he had been hours,  _hours_ spent anxious and dizzy with exhaustion and frustration and a kind of mournful howling emptiness, an echo calling out with no one to reply; an allegory for his entire life.

There’d been a broken down double-decker, everything musky with the smell of sweat and heated metal, the everywhere-grit of powder fine sand he can practically taste.  He’d been nursing an aching envy of humanity sunk deep where it was starting to rot in his gut like something swallowed whole and festering. The blissful mundanity of their sentimental everyday lives.  Food and home and  _people_.

There’d been a kind of ridiculous golden chalice, a lingering waxy aftertaste of chocolate in his mouth and something about knocking.  He doesn’t remember what, but it’s just something his mind has made up, it doesn’t have to make any sense.

Except maybe it’s not and maybe it should.  He’s never been one for intoxicants though, and he’s not certain but maybe its tenacious lasting effect could twist any daydream into spontaneous lunacy.   One complete with giant flies in coveralls and a bored aristocrat moonlighting as a cat burglar.

Not that waking life has often been much better.  The last twenty-four hours have been utterly no exception.

The whole world is pivoting around him, his fingers sinking into the carpet, gripping to pull himself forward, bits of wire and detritus and something that feels wet, almost sticky on his hands as he claws toward the doorway.  Moving his own body weight feels like bench pressing a continent.

He feels flattened, like a shadow, nothing of substance by the time he’s reached the open doorframe, and his vision begins to clear.  His eyes are on Rose, where she’s on the floor, curled on one side, her mouth open, gasping, her eyes staring across the carpet and looking far away like she can see through the walls.  The nausea lightens and he scrambles up, weaving, catching the doorframe in clutching fingers before closing the distance between them in a few strides.  Then he’s down on the ground, gathering her up against him.  Her cheek against his breastplate, she wheezes with effort, her arms coming up to loop around his neck like she’s been drowning and he’s just pulled her from the waves.

“Look at me, come on, deep breaths.”  A palm against her face, he steadies her lolling head.  “Talk to me, Rose.  Eyes open, come on, that’s it.”

She whimpers, still fighting for breath. “Felt so...so sick, all of a sudden.  Just, out of nowhere, I...I dunno.   _Sick_.  Dizzy, and-and,  _cold_ , I...not sure I can explain.”

“You don’t have to.  Happened to me in the hallway.  And again, just a moment ago.  You left the room and--”  He sucks in breath, and before he can think about it, presses a kiss to her forehead in a way he hasn’t dared since before his last regeneration. There’s the chemical fragrance of her hair,  the saline smell of her tears.  It’s awhile before her ragged breathing begins to even out, long minutes watching the tidal rise and fall of her shoulders, the soft breeze of her breath through his shirt; against the vacant country in his own chest where a second heartbeat isn’t.

Before he can think better of it, he’s dropped another kiss on her temple, dragged inevitably into her slow, perilous undertow in the familiar way that’s almost more natural than breathing.  It’s that new kind of gravity again; it’s the fifth force of nature.  He could rewrite postulates of string theory to include it and solve mankind’s struggle with unified field theory and eleven-dimensional space by filling in that singularity with the transfixing law of proximity in relation to Rose Tyler.

And no, there is no such thing as a soul, but if there were, every bit of his that isn’t indentured to wanderlust or guilt has spent the better part of a thousand years seeking the quiet, unhurried warmth of a moment like this one in which he’s found himself.

He’s bowing forward again, carried in the current, drawn in.  His lips bump her skin, an awkward miss of wherever he’d been aiming, landing just below the outer corner of her eye and lingering.

But there’s his old friend logic; a protest shouting from a distant mountaintop in his brain, just loud enough to discern over the thrum of blood in his veins:  _can’t extrapolate a relationship from a biological accident._

The fact that had once come out of his mouth makes him want to swallow his tongue.

Looking up through the dark fringe of her eyelashes, she opens her mouth to speak, but the communicator does it for her, blurting out,   _“Have you activated the jump-disk?  Respond.”_

“Because I left the room?”

“Observer effect,” he tells her thickly, voice emerging a low rumble that manages to feel impatient even while it’s coming out.  “Interaction with the surrounding matter is critical.  You can see how much more chaotic things appear just outside.  We’re interacting with realities in which this building exists, which narrows down the possible realities by which we can be affected.  It’s possible that we’re not in a stable enough state to act as observer to our own mass.  Likely the longer we stay this way, the worse it will get.  We were both alone, not interacting, just like out there, in the corridor--”

_“Big Bad Wolf, do you copy?”_

Rose’s eyes have gone wide again, soft-focus, her knees fighting under her to achieve standing position but she wobbles, pitches forward before catching his shirt in her fists.  “Mum!  But no one’s watching Mum!”

In the bedroom, Jackie isn’t on the bed where she’d fallen asleep.  Instead, there’s only a thick fog of dissolved potentials, arms, legs, a blurred spiderweb of a human being like a smudge on a camera lens and Rose is on her knees, face buried against the cadet blue bedspread.  The Doctor slides the communicator out of her weak grip, a hand spread gently between her jumping shoulder blades.

“Torchwood, report to Pete Tyler that his wife is caught in a low-level quantum liminal state in Suite 2892 of the…hang on,” He reaches for the night table, catching a matchbook in his clutching fingers to read the name.  “Radisson Blu Royal Hotel in Bergen.  We need to make modifications to the transdimensional travel machine to bring our matter resonance to the proper frequency in this universe before we can do the same for Jackie Tyler, and require transport from your facility.”

_“Is this...the Doctor?”_

“I’m activating the jump-disk that was in the possession of Jackie Tyler, check your tracking signal now.”

 _“Receiving.”_   A staticky moment of silence.   _“The coordinates...the coordinates are fluctuating.  We read your location in space but...”_

“Isn’t that enough to initiate a teleport?”

_“Protocol insists we have a firm locational lock on a target, both locational coordinates as well as relative temporal alignment must be--”_

“You have space coordinates, I’m not asking you to move us in time, there is no  _time_ here, it can’t be done.  If you can move us to Torchwood, that’s all I’m asking.”

_“The protocol stipulates all requirements be met for me to initiate a jump sequence.”_

“Then you’re condemning us all to a slow death.  Torchwood’s never been fond of rules, why start now?  Who is this?  What’s your name?”

_“My call number is Control 43.”_

“You’re not a number, you’re a person,  _come on_.”  Rose’s head emerges from the cradle of her arms to look at him sitting beside her with his hip against the boxspring, face wet, eyes fever bright.  “Who is this?”

_“...Byron.  Byron Whitehurst, sir.  And I am sorry, but...”_

“You realize I’m here with Rose and Jackie Tyler.  Pete Tyler’s wife and daughter, your boss, the  _head_ of Torchwood, and you don’t think he’d release you from protocol so I can have a chance to save them?”

_“Sir.  I really am sorry.  I’m just not authorized...if you could wait for us to contact Mr. Tyler...”_

“We can’t walk to London from here, Byron.  I’d reckon we don’t have even time to drive, if it’s even possible, because minute by minute, things are degrading in this state.  We don’t have time to sit and wait for anything.  This is not a state where collapsed matter should exist, it’s shifting around us.  We can’t stay here.”

And on the other end, silence.

“Listen to me.”  The Doctor reaches for his face, scrubs an index over one closed eye before pinching the bridge of his nose.  He breathes deep.  “Imagine.  Okay, Byron, imagine you’d lost something.  Something important to you, maybe a person, maybe the  _most_ important person.  Imagine if something took them away from you...like...you always knew would happen, but you hadn’t wanted to believe it.  Byron, if you lived a thousand years, had chance after chance to make a new man out of yourself and you wasted them all--and then you were given one more.  A genuine  _last chance_.  It’s an opportunity to have everything you ever wanted, to be with that person you lost, to drop every burden you’ve ever carried with you and all you had to do was take it but then everything goes wrong again.  Because the universe, I dunno,  _something_ , time itself doesn’t want you to be happy.”  He shakes his head a little, eyebrows jumping toward his hairline.  His voice drops low, hitching.  “And if the thing it puts in your way is a kid’s voice over a radio who won’t start up a jump disk to give you even a chance to take that opportunity.  What would you do?  If that was your life, if that was you, Byron.  How would you ask?  How would you change their mind?”

Silence.  The Doctor rests his forehead in one hand before the radio comm line opens audibly, though no words come through, only the open-air hiss.  For no reason, breathing has become difficult.  His throat is burning.

_“The jump-disk will need about five minutes to warm up before it’s operational.  Each disk only carries enough mass for one person plus twenty-five kilograms of gear.  You’ll need another.”_

“Ah, Byron I could kiss you.  Rose!”  He holds out a hand, wiggles his fingers at her even as she’s rubbing at her face, on her knees by the side of the bed where Jackie had been asleep.  She’s staring with her glazed, exhausted eyes, eyelashes spiked wet with tears.  And once again, it’s like she’s never seen him before in her life.

“We can’t just leave her!”

“Rose...”

“She’ll wake up.  We just have to wait and she’ll wake up on her own.”

“Wake up?  And what if she doesn’t?  Not  _ever_?  We just wait?”  The Doctor bites into those words, jaw tight, a challenge needlessly hot on his tongue.  The anger is back.

“People have to wait, sometimes, Doctor.   _I_  waited.”

“No, you didn’t.”

 The look she throws at him is so far beyond incredulous there isn’t a word for it in any language devised by a race with less than four primary eyes. “...What?”

 “You didn’t.  You didn’t  _wait_ ; Rose Tyler doesn’t wait. Waiting implies you sit, and twiddle your thumbs and you wait and do nothing else until something comes along.  Isn’t that what you’re saying?  You’d rather sit and wait than do what you can do, is that it?”

 Eye pried wide, she stands so fast she totters to one side, weaves vaguely, looking bewildered and dizzy for a half second before her eyes sharpen, as though she’s bringing him into focus.

 “I didn’t  _wait_ , Rose.  Twenty-seven weeks, orbiting that star in Cygnus.”  He turns his back, sits down against the solid hotel boxspring, eyes studying the pile of the ornate patterned carpet.  “I ran every locality-centric base-7 amplituhedratic logarithm a TT capsule can parse, trying to locate a crack that corresponded with that point, anything, just wide enough to shimmy through and back.  In the end, all I could find was a hairline fracture, just enough to send through a signal.  Three minutes worth.”

 Anger opens her mouth in a wordless fish-gape. She closes it, swallows convulsively before restarting, her voice the rumble of far-off thunder and long-bottled rage.  “I waited for you.  Four months after Canary Wharf.  Five and a half hours on a bloody nightmare spaceship in the 51st century, every time because I trusted you wouldn’t just  _abandon_ me.  That’s called waiting, Doctor.  It’s called patience.  If you think it’s not because you think waiting is doing nothing, you can think whatever you want just like you think it’s okay to make other people’s decisions for them, and how it’s okay to leave someone without saying goodbye because that’s easier for you to live with.”  She’s seething, hands clenching.   “I won’t abandon my Mum like this.  She’s never left me, not once, not even a  _second_ , even when I was ready to leave her and everything I called home--for  _you_.”

“Everyone leaves home in the end,” he says softly, and finds himself holding his breath,watching her with a great stone of guilt sinking in his gut.  Outside it looks more like twilight then dawn. 

Her shoulders leap; a reflexive, nervous shrug.  With a sidelong glance that almost looks venomous, she replies with a palpable bitterness curling her vowels. “Not to end up stuck here.”

 


	7. The Wind By Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Excerpt: "It’s something to consider. That he shouldn't even be here. Every moment he lives in this body, he’s crashing the party. There’s something to be said about that, that just by being alive he’s breaking the rules. It makes him feel, just a tiny bit, a little more himself than he has all morning."

**7:  The Wind By Night**

She could have slapped him across the face; he’d have been less thrown by it.  Instead, this bitter regurgitation of his own long-past frustrated words inspires a sharp pain just under his sternum, something tight and twisting like wringing hands.

It’s reflex that he’s already reaching for her.  It takes a moment, a solid _one-two-three_ seconds to force himself into that new unfamiliar distance; this new requirement for restraint where he keeps his hands and eyes away from her until he understands what kind of ground they’re standing on now.  

Right now, the ground they’re standing on is a kind of ground where she climbs into his lap and touches his face, wrinkles her nose at him and bites her lips and then changes her mind just as quickly.  On his knees, not quite pleading, his reaching hands become fists, pulling away from her with a kind of frantic second thought, like she’s burned him.  She’s too invested in the carpet pattern to notice.  “There’s nothing we can do about this from here.  If we’re lucky we can have this sorted before she even wakes up.”

“What if she _can’t_ wake up?  I’m not leavin--”

“Rose, please.  Maybe it’s asking a lot of you to trust me...”

“Why would that be asking a lot?”  She says it so quickly, so sharply, his tongue dries up--his attempted reply is squelched in his throat. “Wouldn’t it?”

All these ups and downs, hot and cold, angry then playful then upset.  And it’s not just her that’s doing it, that’s the most frustrating thing of all.  She’s got him roiling in her wake, flailing in the tidal swell of Hurricane Rose.

She’s wearing a kind of false-smile, cheeks tight and lips stretched to staunch the sob the rest of her face promises.  It’s a look that she’s worn in his memory for a long time; a forced unhappy smile on a beach, pink skin lashed with a cold wind he couldn’t feel but had squirreled away in his head as an unnecessary recollection.  Another thing to remind him of Rose Tyler the way everything does.   High tide and bending grass, the call of birds and peal of bells and anything else she’d unknowingly redefined in his endless catalogue of things that had once lost their luster in the all consuming dark of his mind.

Somewhere along the line, she became the exception to every rule about himself and the new standard candle for everything else.  He’ll have a hell of a time living around it now.

“ _No_.”  Her voice cracks when she says it, and he’s not sure what that means, if it means anything.

He licks his lips and starts over slowly, enunciating carefully enough he’s practically biting into the syllables with his teeth, aching to take her rounded shoulders in his hands; he claws them tight to his knees instead, sitting back on his haunches to look up at her averted face.  “There is nothing we can do for Jackie like this.  For all purposes, really, she’s safe.  Held in a stasis; inactive.  Pete will know she’s here, and with the right equipment, we can retrieve her and bring her to the proper state.  But to help Jackie we need to get at that dimension cannon.  If it has the capacity to measure timelines--physical time structures--then that’s the place we have to start.  Not here.  Not waiting, sitting here, hoping.”

Rose avoids his eyes again.  The wooden mask is back in place and it almost makes him want to bury his face in his hands, trowel his hands through his hair, makes him want to drop his forehead against a wall hard enough for it to hurt because it would be just as productive as this tiresome wibbling.  

“Let’s get the other disk,” she says after a minute or so, smoothing her hair back with her palms.  She gives a little nod, keeping her eyes trained on the carpet when she pulls in a deep breath, tucking her hair behind her ears with both hands, looking more nervous than preparatory.  “And shoes.”

It’s silent the way back to the room, silent except for the otherworldly groan of the undecided elements outside.  She doesn’t look up, doesn’t take his hand.  Shoes and jackets go on, Rose ties her hair up and he watches her in the mirror, because this is what they have to do:  Stay together, not let the other out of their sight, just in case his theory is right.  Get to Torchwood where he’ll find a way to sort this.

What happens after that, for the moment, can’t get in his way.  He’s lived a whole life looking past his desires.  He can stop himself from begging.

It’s not an option to be stumped.  He’ll work until it’s done.  And at the end of it, if she still can’t decide if she can accept this, if she still can’t shake the feeling that he’s some kind of stranger, he’ll figure out what comes next on his own.  Because moving ever forward, swallowing back the pain and soldiering on is what he does.  It’s what he’s always done long before Rose and it’s what the other--and maybe he--will do long after.

He’ll go on, letting the universe’s cruel current force his hand despite that Gallifrey has long been lost, burned and forgotten and locked away, inaccessible to meddling hands who might try to undo their fate.  He’ll honor those dead because he is all that remains.  

What would the Time Lords make of a semi-human metacrisis?  He’d be an abomination, an animal, his existence a walking obscenity, something to be quietly killed off in a laboratory and burned in a refuse furnace.  Anathema to every value and perception of would-be Gallifreyan purity, whatever that really meant to a race so wrist-deep in the cookie jar of its own genomic sequences it was a wonder they hadn’t ended up sticky blobs in mobile polycarbide armor.

It’s something to consider.  That he shouldn't even be here.  Every moment he lives in this body, he’s crashing the party.  There’s something to be said about that, that just by being alive he’s breaking the rules.

It makes him feel, just a tiny bit, a little more himself than he has all morning.

The jump disks are operational, receiving signal, warmed up already.  Byron comes over the line to explain that he can’t guarantee perfect accuracy, but will aim for the Torchwood sub-basement level.

And the feeling when they are activated makes his earlier nausea seem like a beach day in comparison.  His flesh feels like it’s crawling off his bones all by itself; like he’s turning inside out.

It’s fast, something he can barely track, but there is the unmistakable smell of spacetime, a sulphur smell like smelting metal and as soon as he registers it, he feels in motion, launching forward with a piercing inertia that reminds him all over again why it’s recommended to execute this sort of travel within a capsule.

Then it’s cold before he can think why, everything sopping wet, water sloshing around his ankles, soaking his trainers and the cuffs of his trousers when he finds himself sprinting into it to keep up with the momentum.  It’s a room half-flooded in most realities, flickering only menially, uncertainty still wobbling and squirming in his peripheral.  He collides with a wall painfully while Rose’s voice punctures the flat, rushing sound of water and the ringing in his head.

“Byron!  Come in!  Do you read?”

From the comm comes the familiar, cadence of human speech but the language is just the sound of untranslatable static.

The Doctor struggles to focus in the half-dark, squinting at Rose while she’s shaking the comm unit, twisting knobs.  “Control!   _Control_ , do you copy?  You dropped us in the pumping station!”

Rose sloshes through the water toward the door and shakes the handle furiously, punching buttons on the readout before surveying the room in a sweep, hands to the walls, looking up to the low ceilings with a tightness in her expression that makes him feel peculiarly robbed of breath.  One wall is a steel console, covered in dials and interface devices.  The space above it is wire-reinforced glass, dark shapes of consoles and desks loom beyond.  The gap roaring with water is behind them, a split in the wall that looks rent in half by an immense force, rolled steel edges turned to a snarled hole belching water into the control room.  Shin-deep now, and rising.  

“Control, there’s a _breach_ ,” she’s nearly shouting into the comm, loud enough the Doctor winces.  The headache isn’t finished with him yet.

“The signal is scrambled here, look at these walls.  What kind of pumping station?”  He wades toward the consoles with their lightless displays and dark readouts.  There is no power.

“I told you, the cannon, it--it runs hot, the actual modules are enclosed in a pressurized reactor fitted with open-circuit cooling systems.  They use river water heat exchangers to keep the heat-syncs cooled between activations.”  She gesticulates almost wildly, hands coming up to flatten against her head before trying the comm again.  “Control!   _Byron_!”

“ _Signal_.”  The Doctor reminds her, grimacing against the reverberation of her shout.  He reaches for her arm and misses when she reels backward.  “Rose--”

When she looks at him,  stepping back, her eyes communicate a panic her words can’t muster.   She gestures with her free hand, “They used the cannon to jump us,” she says, forcing a patient, calm voice that once again sounds as though she might be explaining to a child.  “They use the _cannon_ , it heats _up_ , the condenser fills up with recirculated water to cool the system, the pumping station controls the recharge pumps while the used water moves to the cooling tower so we don’t boil the Thames.”

“What happened to the bit with it not being nuclear?”  Boiling the Thames sounds easier than hearing this explanation.

“It’s not!  It doesn’t bloody matter!  That vessel fills with over a thousand gallons in a half-hour and there’s been a breach--this room houses the controls for the condenser coils, it’s sealed off with bulkheads.”  Finally her voice betrays the poorly subdued dread he’d seen in her expression, but when she speaks she sounds like she’s reciting something memorized.  “In the event of a station breach, if the system overheats and something ruptures--in the containment vessel or the cooling coils--all doors are hermetically sealed off to protect the modulesfrom environmental hazard _s_.”

And it’s true.  Aside from the narrow observation window into the laboratory, the rest is riveted steel, even the ceilings.  Water is boiling out of the breach in the metal wall, the lights mounted in roundels along the anterior walls like the inside of a submarine.

Water tight, filling fast, with them inside.  Just something else to escape.

The science is easy enough: a burst of steam pressure, twisting metal, rivets popping, steel splitting open from the exchanger pump into the adjoining space with the liquid ease of a squeezed banana through its peel and a hundred thousand gallons rushing into the gap.

“You don’t have the override?”

“There isn’t any override.  Every door seals shut ‘till the breach is controlled, it’s automatic.”

The water rises palpably in the seconds of silence that follow.  Then he’s in motion.

He’s pulling out drawers along the powered-down console, striding station to station before his brain even catches up with his body. He’s digging in the sticky notes and staples and pens, rubber bands, paperclips, files and manuals he doesn’t have time to read if he’d ever been a manual-reading type. There are flash drives and calculators, boxes of console transistors and catalogued fuses. In one drawer, there’s an unloaded Luger, a tin of bullets packed in foam, and a half-empty box of flax seed granola bars.

In his pockets, there’s a plethora of useless dreck he’d pocketed in a rush once his impending fate had become apparent.  Nothing he’d actually need.  But at the time he’d been gripped with a deep, slow panic that only now is reaching its peak.

He’s breathing hard, breath flooding in and out loudly, and Rose is speaking.  She’s talking, her hands moving, eyebrows jumping on her face while she inclines forward, but all he can hear is the rushing of water, the ragged gusts of his breath, the quick dull metronome of a foreign heartbeat in his ears.  It’s his own; he’ll never be used to it; maybe he won’t get the chance.

It wasn’t ten minutes ago he was spouting off to Byron Whitehurst, accusing time itself of not wanting him to be happy, and sometimes he profoundly hates being right.

There’s no time to build anything, not a tool or a wave interference transformer to spring the deadlock.  For the hundredth time already, he misses his sonic with a ferocity only matched by the churning of ideas in his head that’s loud enough to render everything else just background static.

He crosses to the door, frigid water clutching at his knees when he moves to inspect the lock, the tiny readout screen is dominated by a red interface reading _Emergency - No Egress_.  He works it open to find the circuitboards soldered in Renholder casings.  

“Any systems in place if we break the doorlock?”

“No clue.”

“You know all about the bulkheads and the doors sealing and all that, nothing else?”

“Everyone who works here knows that.  Hear the alarm, get out of the exterior areas.  Fifteen seconds, that’s all we get.  There are drills and things.  I don’t know how the system is controlled.”

“Well, I could’ve done with an alarm,” he tells her.  

“Aren’t places like this supposed to have that thing, you know, those _‘in case of fire break glass’_ things with, oh, I dunno, an axe inside or--vents?  Aren’t there vents?  We could get inside...”

“The doors hermetically seal to keep out harmful gasses and water from damaging these immensely expensive and debateably nuclear modules and you’re looking for vents?”

Rose practically spits nails, gearing up in a very Jackie-Tyler looking way that gives him a little rise, makes her look a little more like the Rose he so lovingly remembers, and he interrupts her as is only appropriate.

“Any ventilation to these areas either doesn’t exist or will seal off with the doors.  Emergency protocol has the electricity shut off, the pumps can’t come online without primary power, we can’t redirect the flood.”

She makes her mouth tight and small, breathing in through her nose, culling her anger and fear into a long inhale-exhale, like the wheeze of a dry wind.  “Could we slow the water coming in?  Buy time?  Isn’t there something inside these control panels you could use to build, like a tool, something to interrupt the program that locks it?  Can we cut off power to that?”

“Slow the water...are there emergency panels with supplies?  Sealant guns?”

“N...no.  But we could block it up.  Or go through the gap, one of us...”  

“Water is patient,” he tells her softly.  “Slow it down all you want, it’s getting in.  It’s getting in so we have to get out.  Think!  What have we got?”

“...we...the jump disks?  They need time--thirty minutes--”

“The room, look at the room!”

“ _Nothing_!”  Rose’s face is tight, denying an expression her features want to buckle into.  This is more than anyone should have to handle.  “We closed it off, yeah?  Donna’s world, where you drowned.  It’s gone.  Never existed.  And now...”

He doesn’t mean to, but he scowls.  

“There’s no such thing, is there?  Things being meant to happen?   Like fate...destiny...?”

“No,” he whispers roughly, then contradicts himself.  “Well.  Time, it’s not exactly a linear progression.  It doesn’t necessarily go ‘and then, and then’.  Direct cause and effect, free will are just biological perceptions.  Most events are in flux, existing in multiple states until they’re observed.  But there are times, rare points in history that never change, _can’t_ change.  Fixed points, they’re like... _ballasts_ , holding the rest of it up.  Anchors, in a way.  Even a spiderweb needs something to attach to.”  He speaks quickly enough for it to come off encyclopedic instead of anything emotional.  

“Like with my Dad?”

“Not exactly.”

“It couldn’t be then?  You drowning, that it’s a fixed point?  If it didn’t happen there...”

“Like I said.  A fixed point can’t change.  A timeline could try to reestablish itself through similar events to its systematic endpoint.  I’ve no feel for it here, can’t sense anything for certain, there’s no time differential at all.  But it bears mentioning that...”

“What?”

“Well.  That there are two of me. A lot more than two if you want to get technical about it, and why not, let’s.  Alternate timelines, a hundred-million of me, a hundred-million of you and all of us, somehow, drowning.  But another very notable me, one you’ve met before who has to be fighting some kind of flood himself if you’re right.”

The water splashes at his hip, and something wet runs down Rose’s face while she blinks, scrubs it away with her palm.  “Don’t talk about that now.”

“Might not have any more time.  What is it about me since we’ve met?  A Time Lord always running out of time, is there anything more laughable? Can’t even count two minutes properly when I’m around you.”

“Doctor.  Stop.”

“Stop what?  Reminding you of him?  That he’s still around somewhere?”

“Yes!”

Somewhere deep in the base, something rumbles.  The steel door trembles at his back, but the world has become very quiet.

Rose demurs, lips pressed together tight in a thin, white-lipped line.  Her legs submerged in the icy waist-deep water, she’s visibly quaking, and when she speaks--so softly--instead of her voice shaking, something rattles deep in the vast barren continent of his metaphorical heart.  

“I said forever.  Then he gave me a choice, and I left him.”

For a moment, and maybe for the first time since the beginning of this life, he has lost the ability to make words.  He makes the shapes but nothing comes out, gaping like a fish.  He reaches, then draws his hands back, remembering.  No touch.

“Oh,” he manages watching her purposefully circle the room, her hands to the walls, face to the ceiling, her mind going in the same kind of aimless circle.  She doesn’t pause, doesn’t stop to look at him.  

“Did you know?”

“Know?”  He’s parroting her stupidly.  He can’t help it.  All this time he’d thought she’d been mourning _him_ leaving _her_.

“Is that--?”  she cuts herself off so abruptly, he can nearly hear her jaw snap shut.

“Is that what?”

“We don’t have time for this.   One of us can go through the gap.”

“Even if we could fit--”

“At least I’m _trying_.”

“Rose--”

“Is that why he didn’t say goodbye?  Did he know?”

There’s nothing in these drawers that will get them through that door in less time than this room will be filled to the ceiling.  His head is pounding, heart straining, the charge of adrenaline feels like an electrical current in his new nerves, the seam-splitting urgency for a solution that doesn’t exist. She’s using ‘you’ and ‘him’ interchangeably now, and he’s reasonably sure she’s circuitously accusing him of knowingly leaving her here to die.   

All in all, things could be going better.  

The water is creeping past his hip, wetting the hem of his shirt, the roar of the hull-breach muting against itself as the split in the below the rising surface of the water.  Everything is made jaundice-yellow in the pumping room’s emergency generator low-power sodium lightstrips.  Rose’s face, damp in the topaz light, turns toward him like a flower following the sun.  It reminds him of standing under the blazing light of an impossible sight; the event horizon of a black hole forever frozen in its final moments to the eye of an outside observer, the death knell of its implacable screaming just static compared to the roaring of the blood in his ears.

Everyone leaves home in the end.

_Not to end up stuck here._

“There’s nothing he would know that I wouldn’t, Rose.”

When she doesn’t respond, the anger wells up.  The formless anger that had been fogging every corner of his mind since the morning.  A black blizzard of almost-fury, reckless almost-jealousy, almost-indignation.  

“And he didn’t say goodbye,” he grits out.  “Because goodbye doesn’t mean anything.   _Words_ ,” he sneers.  “You humans and your words.  All this meaning you hang off of them with full knowledge of how easily they could be lies.  You just said it yourself.  You lot and your _I love yous_ and your _goodbyes_ and your _forevers_ \--like the words mean more than the intent behind them.”

“That remark wasn’t what I’d call in the best of taste.  Maybe it doesn’t make a lick of difference to you, but I _meant_ forever.  Whatever kind of forever I had to give.  And then after everything, the first time I see him in years and he’s dead in the back of an ambulance,” she says this in a low voice, making the distinction very clear now.  You.   _Him_.  “I watched Donna die, lying on her back in the middle of the street in Chiswick.  I saw--”

“She won’t make it.”  He’s said it before he’s even thought it through.  He hadn’t meant to tell her this way, and probably this is cruel and self-serving and an entirely human thing to do.  Sometimes he genuinely wonders whose side is tongue is on.  

And Rose.  All the air has gone out of her.  “W-what?”

“Donna.  Human synapses can’t support that kind of consciousness.  A Time Lord-Human metacrisis can’t survive, not that kind of conglomeration.”

Rose gapes, he keeps talking because he can’t stop.  “She’ll either die, or he’ll remove the knowledge.  Block it out, everything.  Every single memory that connects to that event, everyone involved.  Everything.  She’ll die or she’ll forget.”

Shaking her head in the sickly sodium light, mouth open, her tears spill over.  He isn’t done, but she interrupts before he can get his gob rattling off more explanations.  “And what about you?”

“What _about_ me?”

“A human-Time Lord metacrisis can’t survive?  And what are _you_?”

“I...”

“Are _you_ going to forget or die?”

“Asking for a friend?”

“ _Are you_?”

“It’s not at all the same.”

“Why isn’t it the same!  How do you know, has this happened before?  Do you go around metacrisising yourself every so often?”

“What? Of course not--this is--I--It’s...I have non-human DNA,” he brings his hand up, scrubs at his eyes, blinking away the burn that’s been rising there.  “Mainly non-human DNA, if you want to know.  Donna is biologically human, she can’t contain that energy properly.  Her dendritic arborization in her neocortex isn’t built to parse that quantity of impulses in her calcium channels, the stress will result in inevitable aneurysmal cerebrovascular failure.”

Rose lets all the air in her lungs escape loudly.  “Why are you telling me this now?”

“I could ask you the same thing about why now is a good time for any of this.”

“Well from the look of it, we’ve been granted a properly small window of opportunity to say what we want!”

The Doctor does not respond.  His mouth goes slack, brows snapped low before he clutches at his head.   _Window of opportunity._

The water is lapping at his waist when he lurches back toward the painted metal consoles, the reinforced observation glass stretched above it like a long narrow windshield.   It might as well be a thousand miles thick if it’s an inch.  He climbs for it, wet trainers slipping on the slick metal of the console incline.

“You’re _mad_ , we’ll never get through that.”

“The lab must have full system access, we could control the pumps if there’s power.”

“And if there’s not?  Even if we could get through there--”

“We’ll have more time than we do now for us to think of something else!”

He’s in motion, splashing down and lurching around in the waist-deep water, pulling up an ergonomic net-back chair on metal casters and hefting it upward, turning it in his wet grip before clambering up onto the console face again.  Planting his feet firmly, knees bent, he swings the chair at the heavy glass.  The crash in the closed space sounds like a car collision on the motorway.

With visibly clenched teeth, he adjusts his stance before he swings again, again, harder, grunting with the effort until he’s breathless.   He catches his wind and tries again, the screaming metal crash echoing off the dwindling space.  And without warning beyond a howl of frustration that climbs Rose’s spine like frost, he pitches the chair into the water.

He swears and kicks at the glass, only chipped and scuffed from the chair’s heavy casters.  

“Why did you even let me get this far?” he snarls, plainly no longer addressing Rose.  “You just can’t stand that I might have something good happen to me?  Is it against the _rules_?”

“Doctor...”

In the yellow light, he turns a feral looking faze at her, then smiles in a way that borders on unsettling.  “This can’t be a fixed point.”

With one arm on the console top, he swings back down into the water, nearly diving at the still-open top drawer.  Reaching past granola bars, he extracts the unloaded Luger in one hand, upends the box of bullets into the drawer bottom with the other.  There’s the jingling sound of the casings on the drawer bottom, rolling loudly.

He loads the gun, clicks it shut, pulls the safety.  

“Why can’t it be a fixed point?”  Rose’s voice sounds almost far away; diminished.  

“Because,” he says, and his voice falters.  “There’s no one but me left to decide that.  Not here.  There’s no rules if I’m the only one they apply to, isn’t that right?”

“What if it is?  What if it is and you change it?  Like my Dad?  If that wasn’t a fixed point--”

“That was _your_ personal timeline,” he says with dismissive enthusiasm, “Established events relative to your timesteam looping back on itself.  A snake eating its own tail.  Won’t know until we try, come on Rose!  We’re not just fighting the flood.  We’re fighting time itself!”  He pulls the safety on the gun, extends an arm in a way Rose has never even imagined.  He aims point-blank at the center of the observation window with a mania on his face that makes her feel twisted inside.  The water is up to her armpits.  The world seems to hold its breath.

He throws her an unconvincing grin.  “And I’m gonna win.”

Rose slaps her palms tight to her ears on reflex, recoiling back hard enough her feet loose what is left of their grip and she plunges under.  It’s eight rounds before there is silence again, and Rose is exploding up from the water, choking and gasping while the Doctor stares at the ravaged glass.

The white impact point is a tight spiderweb, a billion tiny cracks in the glass between the polymer.  Ruined as it looks, it is intact.  Before she can track his movement, the Doctor has fetched a fire extinguisher for another assault while she becomes buoyant, her feet rising off the floor under the floodline.  

“Doctor!”  She flails, fighting to tread water in her trousers and boots, the console where he’s standing is inches deep already.  The air pressure is lessening, the water being pulled in now with increasing speed.

She makes for the console, climbing to higher ground while the Doctor presses a hand to the cracked glass.  “Not beaten,” she hears him whisper.  “ _Not beaten_.”

They are shin-deep, standing on the console.  The Doctor is out of breath, out of ideas, out of time.  Frozen here at the end, the point of no return, the event horizon where escape is impossible.

The point at which there is no survival.  Rose squeezes beside him, against the damaged window.  “Let me go through the gap.”

“The force inertia of pounds per square foot equals far more than your body weight.”

“Is that a compliment?”  Her voice trembles; she’s quaking.  He is still out of breath, his singular heart protesting its new inability to share the work.  When she reaches for him, he just spills into her arms like he’s water too, pressing his face to her neck, breathing against her soaked hair.  He catches his hands against her face, her cheeks balled under his palms in a tight tearful smile.  It’s such a familiar expression.  He’s had fitful, cold-sweat dreams of that sad, stretched-thin smile.

“I’m sorry,” he says.  And he is.  He’s sorry about more things than she can ever, ever know.  Could ever know.  More than he’d ever have time to tell her.  More than he has time to tell her now.  The water is boiling up around them, the dwindling pressure pulling the water in faster to fill the last pocket of air.  The sodium lightbars are under water, casting a shivering glow like the windows of a sinking ship.  

“Tell me something,” she whispers. Smudged mascara shadows under her eyes, she bites her lips while she watches him from under her spiked wet eyelashes.  

“What?”

“Anything,” she says, her shoulders jump in something like a laugh.  “Anything you wouldn’t have done before.  ‘Cos...I dunno, I.  I used to tell you everything and...for some reason I’m only just now realizing how much you never said.”

  
The Doctor is quiet.  He swallows with his heart in his throat.

"Well?"

"I'm thinking."

"Yeah? Since when do you think quietly?"

"A lot of things to think through."

His palms are wet, still sealed against her cheeks.  She reaches, covers his hands with hers; her skin cold and wet, her arms blossomed with the braille of gooseflesh.  

He swallows, dizzy now; afraid.  Afraid in a way that’s filled him with a cold weight like stone, like he hasn’t been for so long he’s actually nearly forgotten the sensation.  The water is at their shoulders, crawling slowly higher like the bottom of an hourglass.

“D’you remember Chloe Webber?  In 2012, the Olympics.  She drew the pictures...there was the i..isol...”

“Isolus, yes.  Yes, I remember.”

“You put your hands here.  You went inside her head.”

She slides his hands up for him, insinuating his fingertips toward the slope of her temples.

She whispers, “Can you?”

They are going to die.  Jackie won’t make it out of liminality.  Rose’s baby brother aside, the timeline has effaced.  Corrected itself to its original form where nothing that shouldn’t be here continues to exist.

He doesn’t want her last moments to be anything but her own.  He doesn’t want to accept they are her last.  Or his last.  

“You said to stay out of your head,” he reminds her weakly, paraphrasing, and she laughs with the creak of swallowed tears in her throat.

“ _You_ said we’d grow old together.”

“I said _if you want_.”

A heavy teardrop falls down her face, leaving a wet path that catches what’s left of the light.  “I _did_ want,” she whispers, her Coco-Chanel magazine ad mouth pulls into that miserable taut smirk, cheeks tight with the effort of caging the impulse to sob.  

“I’m sorry,” she says.  She shakes her head, but he’s the one who is sorry.  

With a sharp intake of breath, he opens the telepathic conduit, moves through it. It could only be a few moments, ten or fifteen seconds with her breath coming faster, faster until she’s boneless in his arms, half floating, flying.  What he gives her is a truncated cross section of nine-hundred years and counting.  Arguments with Tegan, equation games with poor brave Adric, chess with Leela, the sound of Susan’s laughter reverberating off the metal walls of the capsule, Grace’s cold hand on New Year’s Eve 1999.  The shock of sudden birdflight on a long abandoned world, the smell of red grass crushing under his running feet, the humming desolate electric black of the interstellar medium.  It’s an electric shock of victory, failure, and mundanity.  Rose pulsates, convulses strangely with her quick breath and squeezed shut eyes, tension pinching her expression into something intense and beautiful, and her mouth comes open on a name her tongue is not trained to enunciate.  

Her voice box cannot produce the vowel-burn and glottal stops necessary to pronounce old High Gallifreyan, but she hears it rushing through the deep echoing vaults of her mind like the sound of the wind by night. A beautiful mouthful of rolling consonants and a cadence like language played backwards from an audio recording, of bells and poems and the deep sounds of the sea--rushing and melodic in a harsh way, alternating warm and cold, ever changing, nostalgic and lonesome.  

(Really, trying to name the sound is like trying to put words to music you’ve never heard, describe the sunset to a blind man, like trying to describe the Doctor himself.  It’s easy to forget it’s not just sound, that she doesn’t understand it or even half of what she’s seen.)

Maybe understanding isn’t the point.  She’s breathless and her mouth has found his.  They are lassoed together, arms and legs and lips, the waterline slips over their locked mouths and they part, tilt their heads back, sucking the last available oxygen along the ceiling.  

“Rose,” he whispers.  “You asked me, before.  What I want.  Remember?”

Eyes wet, she nods.  He squeezes her, palms the curve of her skull in one hand while he fights to stay above the water, continuing in a breathless rush, determined not to run out of time again.

“If I’d known there was a way.  A way to get through, even if it meant waiting, if I could have seen it, I wouldn’t have left you.  I would wait until...the worlds burn.  Until the sun swallows this planet, every planet.  I would have waited if I thought it made any difference at all.  Because what I want is...”  With a dark laugh that sounds more like a sob, his breath beginning to shiver, he tells her the truth.  “Even...if it’s not me you want, or...”

With cold, shaking hands, she reaches for his face, pulling her bottom lip into her mouth and letting out a whimper, her face buckling around that one held-in breath.  “Don’t say that.”

“I won’t say goodbye either.”

“You never do.”  She forces that miserable, sad smile.  With her thumb, she traces over his lips.  

“Not today.  Take a breath, Rose.”

With arms wrapped tight as they can fit, folded together in that last moment where there is everything and nothing more to say, they both pull in a last lungful before the inevitable comes and the water closes over their heads.


	8. Blood and Salt

**8: Blood and Salt**

In Rose’s therapy sessions, they’d once done what Gary called free-association. 

 _Think of yourself on a train,_  is how he’d started, sitting back in his leather chair and expensive suit in that office where everything smelled of shoe polish.  He’d said, think of yourself on a train, describing what you see pass by the window.  Except it’s not the countryside outside the train but instead of the landscape of your mind, the moving river of your thoughts, flowing into each other. What’s important isn’t relevance or form, just the ways the thoughts link together like words in a song.

The key being less ‘ _how does that make you feel’_  and more ‘ _what does that make you think of?_ ’

It was a great idea, one that would have made sense if  _her_ train hadn’t dead ended.  What Gary had eventually told her was that her mind was a mobius strip, that was the term he used.  He’d described it as one of those optical illusion paintings with climbing ants or staircases seeming to stretch out in different directions, but always ending up the same place.  Illogical, impossible structures that mimicked the obsessive grief of her circuitous mind.

Because  _trains_ made her think her of travelling made her think of the Doctor. 

Because  _countryside_ made her think of Scotland made her think of werewolves made her think of the Doctor.

Because moving  _rivers_ made her think of the Thames made her think of emergency water-landings made her think of the Slitheen made her think of the Doctor.

And  _words in a song_ made her think of singers made her think of Elvis made her think of 1953 coronation day and the Doctor’s arms around her in a coral strutted corridor, close enough she could feel his cold breath—so,  _so_  certain she was about to be kissed.

It made her think of how close they’d been.  How close she’d felt to him; the truth of how far away he’d been in reality.  How it was nothing when compared with how far away he’d become, because in the end, distance is distance is  _distance_. 

It’s the same kind of terrible distance she’d felt back then when she looked at her own reflection.  If it was the new universe or something in herself, she couldn’t have been certain at the time.  Everything took on the feeling of looking at it from the end of a long hallway. 

And long hallways make her think of the TARDIS makes her think of the Doctor.

There was no winning this game.  Whether it was ice cream cones or teacups, black holes or shopping trollies, socks or bin bags or galactic centres or nail varnish: inevitably all roads led back to the Doctor.

So free association was out, and Gary—her therapist—had gone on to to teach her about grief and acceptance, the Elisabeth Kubler-Ross scale, because it was like a death.  Sudden, devastating loss where hope is just another phase to progress past.  This included discussion on the idea that she called him Gary because she’d refused to call him Doctor.

She’d nearly failed physics the first time not because she didn’t understand the material, but because she’d regularly walk out of class.  Because the professors explanations were so cold and lifeless, describing things that sounded so much like something he would say in a way that felt so wrong.  She’d wanted to get away from the sound, from the words that didn’t feel as though it was right for anyone else to ever explain them.  As though they were things only he was allowed to know.

And when they were explained, it needed to at four-hundred miles per hour, with hand gestures and eyebrows, that shape his mouth would make around the most important words, teeth flashing, eyes wide, all this preferably while building an ionic catalyser out of rubber bands, ice lolly sticks and parts from a betamax VCR.

Therapy had only helped her put her head back on straight.  Eventually she’d been able to recall that trains reminded her of railway puzzles, that rivers made her think of the Seine outside the window of a bus headed for Parc Asterix, that song lyrics made her think of Jackson Browne cassettes borrowed from Shareen’s mum when she was twelve and still deciding what music she liked.  (The answer was: not Jackson Browne.)

Except, somewhere inside, they reminded her of Elvis.  Of Ian Dury.  Of anything that could help her recall the fading shape of his face and the gatling gun rattle of his voice, the sound of it dropped low when that shadow that lurked in him leapt out into the sunlight, like a reminder of the primeval darkness hiding in the deep places of the Earth.  The blackness that rolled in his expression like something seen from the corner of her eye, just a flicker even when he was smiling. 

And here he is.  He moves like the Doctor, talks like him.  He looks, sounds, thinks, smells the same as ever.  And she’d decided the night before in the hotel lobby bar that she would make a life worth living, live that fantastic life he’d wanted for her.  She’d decided that they would get rained on and see glaciers and hike to the top of Machu Piccu. They’d eat sitting on the floor and consult for Pete and live a more localized version of the wild mess they had before, and she vowed to herself while she’d towed him upstairs to bed that she would  _not_ love him.

No.  Not like before, no matter who he was, is, would ever be.  Doctor or not, she couldn’t.  She would have to be a fool to do that to herself.   Maybe it was selfish and childish, but it was honest. 

And here, not half a day later, here they are and she  _loves_  him and she can’t stop it, it’s all crashing in around her like the water from the breached tanks outside the pumping station.  Rushing in because there is no more time to stop it, and she needs it now, something to bear her up while this time they drown together.

As perhaps they were always meant to do.

So this new kind of accidental free-association is something that is running through Rose Tyler’s mind while she’s putting off death.  It’s a game to play, waiting for her breath to run out.  She’s prolonging the time before her lungs act on their own and expel their contents and suck in. 

Maybe her life is supposed to be flashing before her eyes.  She doesn’t know.  Maybe it is, everything going in circuits and ending up at the same place, same as ever.

Because these days, drowning makes her think of the Doctor, and there’s no free-association needed to come to that conclusion.  The idea had haunted her mercilessly, maybe because her timeline had always ended in this flooded control room, drowning with her arms around him; his arms holding her in a clutching grip where they’re trapped against the splintered mess of the laminated glass.

The Doctor is also drowning, or is going to drown.   (Drowns, has drowned, will drown, is drowning—any amount of study backward causality and multiple realities really ruin a person’s concept of tense.)  This version of the Doctor fated to live in this body less than a full day because he drowns.

It’s too dark to see his face.  She forces her eyes open and it’s a blur of blue and shadow, the mottled watery glow of the sodium floodlights and the vague glow from beyond the cracked glass.  He’s digging in his pocket, she can feel his arm jerking against her side before withdrawing from her and sinking.  She watches his hands feeling around on the dark console top before going down on his knees, face to face with the splintered safety glass, fingers spread, palms flat.

Rose’s lungs are already screaming.  With one hand over her mouth, she pinches shut her nose, imprisoning the dwindling oxygen inside. Panic and terror rob her of clear detail, breaking down movement and time into singular beats while she watches.  He’s pushing on the glass, palpitating it, his hair suspended around his head like a dark halo in an old religious painting, the fabric of his jacket going tight across his shoulders when he exerts pressure.

There is a sound, something dry and sharp, almost percussive, like stepping on a dry twig. 

The edges of her vision are darkening, going black like paper being burned from the outside-in.  Through the cage bars of her fingers, her last lungful erupts in an underwater explosion of bubbles and she chokes, holding back the impulse to pull in breath, skull already resounding with the suffocating liquid silence in her ears and the needy, desperate begging of her limping heartbeat. With each double pump, it pleads with her in rhythm: “ _breathe-in, breathe-in, breathe-in_ ”.

 _“Take a breath, Rose.”_  The last thing he’d ever say.  To her; to anybody.

And she had, she’d taken a breath.  Her last.  There had been so many things she’d wanted to say without knowing what.  She’d wanted to use it so much more sagely, to say something meaningful, something beautiful, something important.  Maybe she hasn’t learned anything at all.

He moves suddenly, climbing up, reaching toward the ceiling, grasping the hardline railings and whipping his legs out, hard against the weight of the water.  Rose convulses against the instinct to inhale, straining upward toward the ceiling, latching onto the rail with her veins pumping acid, her lungs trembling, eyes burning, heartbeat rushing in her ears.  She can’t see his face, but she rears back with him and kicks. 

They reel back, they surge forward, drive their heels into the laminated glass.  She manages a last kick before her lungs disobey and suck in, pulling in the river water and sending her into a retching cough, body protesting violently against the pain.  The Doctor’s hands grip her arms, she can feel them land on both sides of her face but her eyes are screwed shut, everything going dark, her consciousness sputtering out.

If there had been air, she would hear his voice.  She  _wants_  to hear his voice.

Instead, he releases her.  His hands are gone and the pain is splitting, sharp and burning and branching outward from her lungs, and then there is nothing at all.

It’s an upheaving feeling, a spiraling force that slingshots them forward.  Something hard rushes up and barrels into them.  Rose’s head and shoulder impact it hard, then her knees.  There’s an ambient roaring, maybe her own blood in her ears.

She’s being lifted, gently turned.  It takes the sound of the Doctor gasping for reason to materialize in her oxygen deprived brain: the water is gone, but she still cannot breathe.  Her lungs labor, and she flounders.   _Panics_.

Curled on her side, something thumps her back, prompting a heaving cough; a gasping, muscle-tightening choke.  Her stomach clenches and she retches, the water lurching up her gullet like a scream.  When she fights it, his hands are on her, petting her hair.  She can hear him panting, his breath catching around her name.

She chokes on her reply before erupting into more spluttering coughs.  Another slower disaster is already promised by the pouring long waterfall of the busted window and he holds her head above the shallow but rising water: the roar that hadn’t been her blood in her ears after all. 

Rose wheezes, gulps in air.  She blinks around, focusing, squinting through the blur that has settled over her vision.  The Doctor’s profile is lit in high contrast above her, the ceiling mounted fluorescents shining a corona around his head and the silhouetted fan of his wet eyelashes, the aquiline curve of his nose. With air back in her lungs, she starts to laugh, rasping delirious laughter that deteriorates into gasping and coughs.  There’s a flash of his teeth in the dark before he collapses beside her, rolling onto his back, eyes squeezed shut, mouth open, breathless with what looks like laughter and pain at once; everything is background to the sound of her own ratcheting breath. 

All those things he’d shown her in those seconds she was immersed in the slipstream of his thoughts, they come back while she watches him across the gathering water. That long past shadow play that he’d projected into her mind, scenes from a life she cannot quite decipher beyond a rat’s nest tangle of emotions: an intense alienation, disgust and anger, soul-twisting bitterness, everything pervaded by persistent emptiness; darkness and distance and perpetual motion.  She’s left with a carousel of mind bending vistas like postcards sent from a thousand worlds. Ghost visions of planets from high above at daybreak, sunlight burning like liquid fire reflected in the lakes and rivers of an entire hemisphere.  The deep bottomless darkness of interstellar space, a silence enormous and complete.  Horizons and skies full of imaginable arcs of galactic arms, brilliant neon riots of luminous gas a hundred thousand light years wide, structures branching out into infinity, things she has no name for.  A personal empire as wide and deep as all of space and time, and while faces could come and go, the only constant is that nothing lasts. 

This is an existence defined by loss; continual subtraction.  A whole that is less than the sum of its parts.  A great man who’d had greatness forced down his throat.  Who was still young enough and stupid enough to hope that maybe there could be something—anything—that could really last forever.  That someone could promise something that impossible. 

Even stars burn out.  Even subtraction stops at zero.  Number operation of wholes breaks down into integers, theoreticals, subtracting from something that is less than a whole.

His is a personal empire dwindled down now to this; this half-reality where there is no time, no space.  Nothing, no constants, just the two of them trapped in the amber of this eternal moment for however long it will last.  And not even that, because she has been so caught up in the part of him that isn’t here, looking back instead of forward.  She’d asked him what he wanted—what  _he_  wanted—and while she couldn’t discern the answer from what he’d shown her, not in words, she can feel it, and it makes her eyes burn.

For just a moment, her stomach churns with the knowledge that she doubted his authenticity; as though The Doctor was just a face that could be worn.

With his voice hoarse, he’s bearing her up, testing her strength to stand.  “Let’s get at that pump control.  Can’t promise that will work twice.”

He’s barely finished the sentence before she’s up on her knees, her arms thrown around him to hold tight while her eyes run over.  Dizzy and frozen and hyperventilated as she feels, this time she’s choking on tears instead of breath, a deep ache behind her lungs, her posture gripped by a tight tremble that spreads to her limbs.  His breath is warm, everything else sodden and cold except where her hand grasp at the back of his arm, where it’s warm, even hot.  The Doctor holds her like she’s a life raft, buries his face where her shoulder meets her neck and breathes hot and shaking into the soaked and creaking cloth of her jacket.  He apologizes, and she laughs, coughs, dams back a sob.

“Is there anything you can’t do?”

His voice is small and muffled against her wet clothes.  “Not anymore.”

“Not half mad, are you?”  She laughs, drops a kiss somewhere near his ear, pressing her cheek against his.  “Thought it couldn’t break, that window.”

“Water pressure.  Glass’ integrity was demolished, it would never hold the weight of all that water.  We just helped the edges along to their inevitable failure, in time to be of benefit.”  He heaves a ragged sigh, raking wet hair away from her face with his fingers.  “Took a bit more than I bargained, if I’m honest.”

She squeezes him, grips his arms to draw close enough for a kiss, and he recoils back in a convulsion of pain, leaving her with a wet handful of bright red from the place it was hot under her hand.  It’s a sight that steals breath she’s still too greedy to share, and for a moment, it’s like she’s drowning all over again. 

“You’re bleeding.”

With a noncommittal wince, the Doctor claps a hand to the back of his left tricep, tucking the wound under his palm.  “Must’ve caught the edge of the window on the way out.”  When he brings his hand back, it’s painted scarlet.  “It’s fine.  I’m fine.”

“It’s  _not_  fine.  Let me see it.”

“Later,” he tells her, waving his hand, stooping mid-stride to catch a palmful of water to rinse the blood, moving toward the back of the expanse of the room with Rose in tow.  She follows through the dim cavern of polished concrete and cubicles, the water sloshing around their ankles decreasing until there’s just the wet squelching of their shoes.  He rushes ahead of her, and she can see the arm of his suit soaked red from elbow to shoulder.

“Doctor!”

He’s at a powered console, attacking it with his long fingers, hair still pasted to his forehead before it plows a hand over it, eyebrows snapping low while he reads the monitor, striking keys to cycle down the digital schematics.  “The auxiliary power feeds from hydroelectric?  What’s the reactor casing  _for_?”

“The cooling system.  Keeps the hot water separate.  Doctor, your arm—”

“Yes, you mentioned it.  It’s not contaminated water?”

“No, just boiling hot.  It’s routed in a cooling circuit, the pumps keep the new water moving through the reactor casing.”

“Then what’s in the reactor? If it’s not nuclear—what’s reacting…?”

“ _Doctor_.”

He’s still typing, craning forward, squinting at the monitors.  Briefly he checks the inside pocket of his jacket for glasses that aren’t there, and sets back to scaling through screens of text and pressure readings until he produces an exaggerated grin that thinly covers the tension in his features.  It’s another moment before a shudder deep inside the brick and iron warren of the Torchwood complex indicates the firing of the pump engines. There’s the groan of the intake system pulling in a hundred gallons per second, and a triumphant hum from the back of the Doctor’s throat.

“Pumping system pulls from the river; so reversing their flow feeds back into it.  Enough to staunch the leaking from the ruptured tank.   Good for us, bad for the river.   _If_  there were anyone out there to be worried about it, which I suppose— _oh_ , look at this.  Lockdownsystem opt out procedures, fifteen second unlock-relock delay for evacuating any given area.  Which direction are we headed?” 

Rose watches a garnet droplet appear at the wet cuff of the Doctor’s left sleeve.  Mixing with the water on his skin, it tracks along the lines of his bent wrist toward the pull of gravity, zigzagging down along the fine bones of the back of his hand to the ridge of his knuckles.  “East corridor. The infirmary.”

“Rose, the cannon module.  I’m fine.” 

“Alright.  Take off your jacket, let me see it.”

“Rose—”

She bends toward him, undoing the top button herself before he complies with a slow-motion petulance.  Popping open the buttons with deft fingers, he draws his arms out one at a time and Rose is not prepared for what is under the fabric.  There’s a deep ravine carved into the back of his left tricep, deep enough the welling blood looks black, the edges of broken flesh sharp and angry.  If it was broken glass or a jagged edge of metal it’s hard to tell, but part of the architecture has taken a massive bite out of the Doctor’s arm and his blood is evacuating the disaster area in alarming quantities, escaping in fat bright raindrops from the point of his elbow, running in stripes thick and red as uncoiling Christmas ribbons.

Her sinuses burn hot and there’s an invisible noose tightening around her throat, a kind of suffocating fear that reverberates down the length of her bones, resonating like a struck steel pipe.  “This needs stitching.” 

The Doctor bends his arm awkwardly back to see. “Later, I suppose.”

“Not later.  Right now.  This second.  Open the east corridor, we can get to the medical wing.”

The Doctor sighs, sallow with shadow-ringed eyes and looking half-drowned, entirely too close to the memory of what he’d looked like as a cadaver on a gurney.  “It’s unclear how long this…whatever you want to call it…temporal bubble…?”  He affects a stern look.  “How long it can sustain itself, with or without us here.  For the same reason we couldn’t wait for Jackie, we have to address what could be a shrinking concurrence to the time differential—”

“If we were to be home, or—back where we should be—just in the place everyone else we know—”  None of this is coming out the way she wants, because home and the place they should be is not the place she means and they both know it.  “If we were in a single reality, would it be flooding there?  Say we jumped back right now.”

He doesn’t answer right away.  “Can’t be sure.  The uncertainty in here, it’s less than in the hotel, that kind of flickering.  Don’t you think?  You could almost ignore it.”

“And what’s that mean?”

“It could mean there are less possible realities for this structure, or they’re just less visible.  It has to be that the cannon is here, that kind of technology, something that measures actual time constructs via exposure to superconductive critical temperature where particle resonance is slowed enough to manifest all condensed probability, creating a kind of stabilization around itself like…”  The Doctor’s voice goes soft suddenly.  “A diving bell. Resisting its own inherent entropy while it generates probability variance at Planck scale.  We could still be running concurrent with the reality we’re trying to sync to, so the breach could exist there.  We could radio out to verify but that comm won’t work after being submerged.”

Rose sighs hard, head ringing.  “Point is, if we’re using the same equipment as they are, in my Torchwood, we have to wait for the cannon to cool before we could use it: twenty minutes.  Plus the flooding, the coolant system will be offline at least until it’s repaired.”

“Can’t wait that long.  I’ll survive—”

“And what if you  _don’t_?”

The Doctor opens his mouth, but nothing comes out.    

“Does that even occur to you?  That you might not?  We’ve gone this long, we can wait twenty minutes.  An hour, even, if we had to.”  Before he can argue, she’s reached out, a hand on either side of his face.  “I waited.  I know you think waiting means something else, and maybe it does to you, Doctor, but I  _waited_.  Almost four years, I waited after that day—every morning I woke up, and I couldn’t help it, I thought about  _you_.  I wondered where you were, what you were doing.  If you were okay, or hurt, or.”  Her eyes heat up, and she blinks away the fog of tears.  “If you were thinkin’ about  _me_.”

“I was.” 

She gives a tight, tearful smile.  “And here we are, yeah?  Almost died.  Almost drowned and didn’t.  Everything’s gone wrong and impossible, everything’s a mess, but here we are.  Hasn’t even been a proper day yet.  What if it was me bleeding?  You’d want to wait?”

It’s without another word that he maneuvers open the east door, the fifteen second relock-delay howling an alarm while he follows her through, led by the hand.

He doesn’t watch.

He controls his breathing the way they teach anxiety patients: slow, in through the nose, out the mouth.  Keeps the blood pressure low, decreases heartbeat.  These are not things he’s accustomed to having to regulate via secondary and tertiary systems, and proper pain management systems are mysteriously missing altogether. He does his best not to squirm, which is proving shockingly difficult every time the thread drags through the raw flesh, pulling taut to draw another millimeter of the wound shut.  This is after saline irrigation and the stink of silver nitrate that almost but doesn’t quite cover the smell of the blood.  It’s heavy, astringent, like a palmful of coins on a hot day, a smell with sharp edges that is so  _human_  it makes him dizzy. 

Sitting quietly under the hundred-watt torch of the spotlight, with the ruined mess of his shirt wringing between his hands, the Doctor breathes slowly.  In, out, focusing on breath and not squirming, avoiding verbal cues toward distress.  As many bodies that have hosted him, bodily injury is something he’s had mercifully little to do with.  In the grand scheme of everything, it’s funny—-maybe not funny, not the kind of funny anybody would want to laugh at, but ironic—that the first body he’s had that he desperately needs to take care of, and he’s already damaged it enough to require medical intervention. 

Perhaps it’s to his benefit that Rose doesn’t chance a look away from the iodine stained flesh pinched between her fingers to see his equally pinched expression.  His breath hitches periodically when the waxy suture pulls taut, he can’t quite control it well enough to avoid reaction altogether.  Rose knots the line, hooks the tiny half-moon needle through the deep edges of the laceration.  And despite the orange-colored hemostatic topical she’s painted over the wound, the Doctor’s breath jumps when the thread follows the needle through, the split flesh drawing back together, pressing out more blood that she daubs clean with a folded triangle of gauze.

“You’re making me nervous, being so quiet.” 

He manages a breathy sound that passes for a laugh.  “Think it’ll scar?”

“Yeah.  Full-thickness wound, down to the dermis.  Can’t heal without new fibrous tissue.”

“Never had a scar before.”

“First time for everything, yeah?”

Inexplicably, there’s a rush of heat to the Doctor’s face, and he nods.  “Sure.”

“Doing alright?”

Now the Doctor does laugh.  He drops his head against the vinyl padded backrest and closes his eyes.  “I went back to New Earth.”

Rose pushes through the needle and pauses.  “Sorry?”

“I took Martha.  Thought she’d want to see, you know, what kind of place humanity creates…”  He trails off with a furrow drawn between his brows, eyes still closed, face toward the ceiling.  “I just wanted to…see it again.  Like we did.  It didn’t turn out like I’d hoped.”

“You told her about me.”

The Doctor nods, he makes a sound when she tugs the line through.   There’s a beat of silence that feels thick, and reality squirms around them, everything twitching, fluttering like moth wings in the peripheral.  Here’s just another moment where, simultaneously, nothing feels as it should and it feels as though nothing has changed at all.

“Ever gotten stitches before?” 

The Doctor smirks, his shoulders give a little bounce of mirth.  “A bit like me asking if you’d ever churned butter.”

“I could’ve churned butter before.”

“Have you?”

“No, but I could’ve done.”

“I think I’d like to see you churning butter.”

“Oi, I bet you would.”

He smiles humorlessly at the ceiling, respiration choppy, the halogen burn of the spotlight shining red through his eyelids like a windowshade of flesh and tiny capillaries.  

“So no stitches, then?”

“Not even one.  You’ve done a lot?”

“I was certified last year, field medic.”  She completes another knot.  “That painkiller kicking in yet?”

 The Doctor shakes his head. He intently watches the thin air.  “I’m sorry.”

 “No call to be sorry, I’m sure it’ll take effect any second now.”

 “I didn’t ask you.”

He can’t see her, but he can tell she looks up from her work.  Her fingers pause.

“I didn’t ask…I sent you away to be with Jackie and Pete, at Canary Wharf.  I didn’t ask what you wanted; I thought I knew what was better.  Because when it was me…I didn’t get to choose.   I made you take the choice I couldn’t.  I knew you wouldn’t and I just wanted…”  With his eyes open, he rocks his head along the backrest to look at her with increasingly glassy eyes.  “It shouldn’t have been about what I wanted.  And you were so brave.”

“Just…just relax, Doctor.  We’re about there.”

“You always ask the best questions.  Right from the start.”

Rose smiles.  Two more stitches go by in a tense quiet, punctuated with strained breath. 

“Half a day in you were swinging on a chain over a furious molten Nestene to save someone you hardly knew.  Rose Tyler, running toward danger.” He overemphasizes her name because the feel of the syllables tripping off his tongue is something he will never not appreciate.

“How could anybody resist that?”

“You made a Dalek feel something.  What chance did I have?”

She presses her lips together, makes another stitch and he turns his eyes back to the ceiling, all his unfamiliar internal organs in chaos at her lack of reply. 

Knotting the waxy black line, she hooks the needle into his flesh for the final suture and draws the thread through with the clamp.  He feels every nanometer of it, it echoes through the network of his still-new nerve endings like the fire of canons. 

“Do you know,” she begins, then hesitates.  She takes a breath.  “All those times.  More and more, when we were together, the thing that gave me courage?  It was that there was nothing that scared me more than the idea that…I dunno…that I might lose you.”

“That made you brave?”

She nods with a slow inhale, and again, he wheezes with what what is not a laugh but isn’t anything else.  The painkiller is working beautifully in all the wrong ways.  This is what being human is: a constant state of physical and emotional semi-discomfort with which he can only now truly commiserate.  “Made a right coward out of me.”

“I’d have never left you.”

“Maybe not on purpose,” he says.  “But then, there may have come a time where you’d had enough of me.  And there’s rather an age difference that hasn’t much been addressed.”

When he looks down at her, she’s snipping the thread, wrist deep in sticky red in her blue latex gloves, her arms and shirt smudged and spotted with his bright human blood in the halogen spotlight.  “Always heard age is relative.  I’d think you’d hit some kind of plateau around four-hundred.”

He laughs openly, and she shrugs with an almost-smile, biting her bottom lip lightly while she paints one more layer of the orange topical over the black stitched seam of the wound.  His headache is finally lifting, and underneath that tyrannical weight there is light; a stripe of sun peeking along the bottom of a closed door.

“I can’t imagine this is what you had in mind,” she says, unrolling a gauze wrap and securing the end around his bicep, carefully bandaging with deft, practiced movements over the knotted seam she’s painstakingly sewn into his arm.  “You know, when you dropped yourself off here with me.”

“I wanted you to be happy.” He clears his throat, making a face, evaluating his sentence.  His expression works slightly as though he means to amend it, to sputter and correct and rephrase.  Instead, he pulls in a long, slow breath and finishes so mildly he can only blame the painkillers or blood loss or spending the last lifetime running his mouth while saying essentially nothing of any substance.  It’s second nature to bite his tongue when he’s about to let fly with sentiments too simple to bookend with references to Newtonian physics or the Niels-Bohr model of the atom.   “That’s the only thing I had in mind.”

“Yeah?  Not the cost of saving everything?  Not, what was it—anger and revenge?  Making you better, isn’t that what this was all about?”

“I suppose I should apologize. It’s really not—”

Rose gives a little shrug, dismissive.  There’s a beat of silence before she says, “I went to a therapist.”

“…sorry?”

“A Torchwood therapist.  Pete asked me to go.  After,”  she makes a vague hand gesture that looks somewhat circular.  “After everything.  He thought it would help me.”

“Oh.”  The subject change leaves him with momentary verbal whiplash that he blinks away.  “And. Did it?”

“Some days more than others.  I kept myself too busy to really listen, I think.  But listening and doing what I’m told, if it’s supposedly for my own good or not…I dunno, I don’t think that’s ever been my strong suit.”

“An overrated virtue, in my opinion.”

“You  _would_  say that.  Gary didn’t much see it that way.  He said I was stuck on one of the phases of acceptance, I wouldn’t stop bargaining.  Trying to find a way to change things, but, I don’t know.  I think if I said everything I did, that it was just leg work toward getting back, I think that would be lying.  I did the things I did because, well.  I wanted to do them.  I couldn’t go back to just…getting up, going to work, coming home, getting takeaway, going to the pub.  After that life, going back to a life where every day starts with the alarm clock and ends with the telly…it’s like, I dunno. You don’t want to go back.  You  _can’t_  go back.”

Rose stands from her wheeled medical stool and sits on the edge of the exam table beside him.  “Maybe it’s melodramatic.  Gary said, working on the cannon, consulting for Pete, they were ways I was looking to get back.  You said I couldn’t.  And I believed you, Doctor, I did. But then, all those stars, blinking out…”

“Do you know the story of Orpheus?” 

She throws him a look for what she interprets as a sudden topic change; like they’re backsliding, losing traction again.  “Isn’t that from a science fiction film?”

“No,” the Doctor chuckles.  “An old story from Greece.  Orpheus was a Greek hero, son of a Muse, a venerated musician and poet.  One of the Argonauts—his music gets Jason past the Sirens, you must have read that in school.  But  _his_  story is that he loses his wife—Eurydice was her name—on their wedding day, she falls into a pit of vipers and is bitten and dies shortly afterwards.  Orpheus mourns, but instead of choosing to die to be reunited with her in the Underworld as would be common to these sorts of tales, he travels to the Underworld while alive, and plays his music for Hades.  As a kind of appeal.  Hades, he’s the God of the Underworld—”

Rose laughs.  “I know  _that_.”

“Hades is so moved by the music that he agrees to allow Eurydice to return with Orpheus.  On one condition:  that he walk ahead of her on the way out, never looking back to ensure that she is following until they have reached the soil of the upper world.”  The Doctor clears his throat.  “So they set off, and Orpheus, despite his anxiety, manages to not look back until he sets foot into the upper world, where he turns immediately—forgetting that they must both have exited to the world above—”

“Oh.”

“And Eurydice vanishes from his sight, but—forever this time.”

“All because he looked back too soon.”

“Yes.  A test of faith that he fails, either out of perceived mistrust or lack of belief.”

“That’s a terrible story.  That’s not why he looked back.  Anybody would look.”

“It’s a tragic story.   It’s a theme repeated in any amount of folklore.  Izanagi and Izanami, Sumerian myths of Inanna, the Mayan stories of Ix Chel, the biblical tale of Lot’s wife, who g-”

“She gets turned into a pillar of salt, right?  Because she looked back at the city, the city where they lived.  Full of people, about to burn.  How could she not?”  Gingerly, she picks up his hand, examining it, turning it over to see his palm and drag the tips of her fingers over the creases there as she has done before, looking for the future or just remembering the past.  “And I can’t tell, did you just change the subject or are you telling this story because I was looking back?  Bargaining?  Trying to do what you said was impossible because I didn’t trust what you said?”

“ _Well_ ,” he deflects.   “I’ve never been one for not looking back myself.  Not looking back is doing what you’re told.  Believing instead of seeing.  Faith in place of verification. There’s nothing more human than looking back.”

“So which one of us is Orpheus?”  She tries to smile and comes up a little short, looking drawn and drenched with the round-edged lines of her face made softer by exhaustion, beautiful in a way that words utterly fail.   Beautiful like the sight of home after a long absence, like the smell of rain at the end of a long drought. He closes his hand around hers.  This is not a test of faith.  He would any day choose to be Lot’s wife than the deity that destroyed those mythical cities of plain men in order to save them.  He has not always succeeded at this, but he’s learning, and she has long been his tether to his own would-be humanity. More than he’d ever understood, but maybe understanding isn’t the point.

“If you’re paying attention, Rose Tyler, it means we’re both a pillar of salt.” 


	9. The Flood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Doctor", she says. "I'm not made of glass."

**9: The Flood**

He doesn’t recognize the tune. Maybe there isn’t one. 

She’s undressing behind him, humming vaguely so he can hear, can _observe_ in a measureable way to avoid the disorientation that comes with isolation. As though he required something further than the sound of her zipper lowering and the wet scrape of soaked denim prying free of her limbs to _take note_ of her existence. He is already observing those things quite intently, despite the unwanted static the painkillers are introducing into his typically keen perception. The Doctor focuses on her soft humming, the low vibration of her voice, closing his eyes against a weary exhaustion and the subliminal buzz of foreign compounds metabolizing in his veins. 

Outside, it’s that perpetual half-light that could be dusk and could be dawn. In some versions of reality it’s still raining while in others there is snow; the slow-motion fall of the flakes against the shadowed glass, collecting, silver, orange, dusky purple in the maybe-sunset. The medical bay is dark, the overhead fluorescents doused and the low drone of the cooling pump rattles deep in the walls; a flat, soporific sound.

“Nearly done,” Rose says from the forbidden country behind his shoulder. He can hear the scrubbing of the towel against her skin, and how he managed more than two years of this, keeping his thoughts and hands to himself, he’ll never understand. The ugly truth is he’d have never managed it in this body, this semi-human body with its less-than-stellar control of its own hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. He’s pumping out vasopressin, cortisol, adrenocorticotropin. The problem is that back then, he’s rather certain she’d have allowed it, and still he’d never touched her in anything less than a respectful and wholesome manner out of a sense of propriety and self-preservation, no matter how she made his palms itch. No matter how restless he’d become in her proximity.

They’d already played the first round of this game with her back turned and him stripping out of his soaked shoes and trousers. Instead of humming he’d let his gob run, words streaming and tripping against each other at the strange sensation of undressing while explaining derivatives of particle delay and perceived incongruence in time differential to Rose. Pulling his sodden pants off his legs while her back is turned, he’d been feeling most peculiarly like she could see everything anyway. And why he’d be so mortifyingly embarrassed about it even in theory is just another primitive chemical reaction he seems to now have little neural control to dampen and neutralize.

Human bodies and their involuntary-response endocrine systems. He’s naming off every over-functioning component to himself to keep his focus where it belongs. _Pars nervosa, median eminence, pituicyte_.

He’s sitting on the oversize exam table in a towel, legs hanging over the edge of the blue-vinyl padding, pitched forward enough to prop his elbows to his knees and hold his head. And she’s humming behind him, drying herself. He can still smell the blood, but the headache is finally gone, leaving behind a ringing absence like the reminder of an atomic blast.

Rose appears in his peripheral and he turns his head away on reflex, even though she’s wearing the towel like a garment, tucked in front. Her fingers press gently at the bandaged wound along his tricep, the sutured line that crosses his skin with the random bends of a river over land, hidden under clean dressing. 

“How is it feeling?”

She’s circled around to stand in front of him where he can’t pretend he doesn’t see her, and he brings up his arm enough to see the gauze wrap. Looking at it, this very real wound in this completely surreal setting; it seems almost misplaced, imaginary. Like trying to read a book in a dream and finding a tangle of indecipherable nonsense where there should be language.

“ _Well_ ,” he tells her, and she laughs breathily before he’s finished. Maybe they’re both a bit delirious. Maybe it’s just relief he hears in her voice but all the same, like everything does, it makes him want to touch her. Rose reaches for him instead, stepping gingerly between his knees the way she had the night before in the hotel bar, slipping her arms around his shoulders, bare and still damp, drawing him close; inviting his touch without question. Ear to her chest, the Doctor folds his arms around her, doing his best not to shudder in hysterical ecstasy at the feeling of her willing hands on his skin. It’s the strangest thing, how every time she touches him it’s like he’s never been touched by anyone before. Like it’s something she’s invented. 

And he’s ticking off _paraganglia_ from his list. _Pinealocyte. Corpora arenacea._

There is every reason in the universe to be deliriously pleased at the moment, because he’s here, and she’s here, they are alive and together and _here_. Instead, he’s vibrating with anxiety, sick-stomached with a feeling of suspense. Androgens and endogenous opioid peptides are conspiring against him because this homo-sapien biochemistry is his newest bitter enemy, and Rose has noticed.

“Does this make you uncomfortable?”

“No.” Yes. It does. Very. Just not the kind of uncomfortable she means. It’s a gut-clenching, marvelous kind of uncomfortable, like standing at the edge of a high building and looking down. 

“Not a great day, so far, first day in--”

“Pete’s World.” 

Rose’s shoulders jump with restrained laughter and she repeats the name slowly, drawing out the vowels with a smile in her voice. “There’s a lot more to this world than Pete. A lot that’s different. Big pieces of history I learned that didn’t happen here. Nazis and things. The first world war is all different; the British occupation of Palestine ended a year sooner. Civilizations that never took hold, or just--dates on big events are moved around. I dunno, I was never big on History. I guess that’s good. Easier to get acclimated when I’m hard pressed to remember how it should be.”

“Maybe,” he says, and Rose raises a hand to his head, trailing her fingers through his damp hair, raking it backward gently enough that the shudder he’d suppressed earlier rages to the surface. He shivers and she chuckles, it echoes firmly through her chest before funneling back into his ear. When he draws back, she’s looking down, her face close enough to be out of focus, her forehead tilted against his, eyes closed.

And he’s listing _zona_ _glomerulosa, zona fasciculata, zona reticularis_.

With one hand, he walks his fingers up to the top of her towel, finding bare skin covering the sculpted rise of her shoulder blades, gently skirting them with his fingers with such a delicate, diffident touch that she laughs again. He handles her the way someone would examine something expensive and fragile. She’s a Ming vase, a Faberge egg. Some kind of artifact, like that musical instrument in Van Statten’s museum--such a long time ago now in a different life and a different universe. 

“Doctor,” she says. “I’m not made of glass.”

In return, an incongruent reply tumbles out without any mental inspection, sounding far more like a plea than a statement, and when his voice falters, he forgets to be embarrassed. “I’m not a stranger.” 

“Of course you’re not.” 

Without thinking, he presses a kiss to her shoulder with a kind of spontaneity that is only a little more liberating than it is terrifying, and when she says nothing, another. He speaks, his breath glancing off her skin, voice increasingly unsteady in his anxious and medicated exhaustion. “Last night. You said...you wished I didn’t feel like a stranger. And...I know I--”

The heels of her hands settle against his jaw on either side, tilting his face up while she shakes her head ‘no’, smoothing the pad of her thumb over the dark arch of his eyebrow before her lips catch his like something magnetic. A new kind of silence forms around them the way snow gathers around things, a quiet underlined only with the sound of breath, the soft clicks when one kiss becomes another and another, gentle, dry and then neither, mouths slanting open, releasing and reconnecting wetly, a heart-pounding slow-burn where he almost forgets he can’t forestall breathing entirely. 

He’s forgotten about his list. Years could pass like this, drinking slow kisses from her mouth with his eyes closed in the thrall of his inelegant lusting, held in her arms, just the low background murmur of the machinery of the universe grinding to a halt while he doesn’t notice at all.

“Back there,” she says, drawing back far enough for a breath. “In the pump station. Was that all this dangerous vengeful anger I’ve been hearing about you?”

“I should apologize.”

In the space between lips, she whispers. “No more apologies. No more about stupid things I said. Just...promise me something.”

If only it were that easy, making promises and life unfolding in a way that allows you to keep them. 

“Promise you won’t disappear.”

Rose reaches and picks up his hand from its jittery perch on her hipbone, brings it upward and between them, presses his knuckles to her lips. “Doctor,” she whispers, and it sounds like a prayer canticle at an altar of sacrificial flesh, low and hot, full of hope and held breath. 

He’s heard that word spoken in almost every way imaginable; threatening, in fear and fury, with challenge, dismissively, plaintively, but somehow every time she says it, it sounds new, like a word she’s made up on her own. It makes his skin feel too tight, his lungs too small, every exhale sunburn-hot. He watches her lick her lips, and all he can think to do is nod.

“Even if sometimes I look back?”

Now he chuckles, a weak breath of tense laughter because of all things, he is the last person in existence that could begrudge anyone their regrets. “Especially then.”

With the tense claw of his fingers, she plucks at the tucked end of her towel, the warm continent of her skin unveiled by the thoughtful hand of gravity like from behind a sweeping stage curtain, every curve and shadow in burnished gold and salmon in the shifting multi-state light. It’s only reflex that makes him inhale so sharply, prompting a bounce of laughter in Rose’s bare shoulders. It’s with slow, nervous hands that he maps the topography of her body: the plains of her back, the valley of her waist, the rise of her ribcage, the swell of her bare hip. It’s a meticulous process, this memorization, committing each plateau and ridge to memory under his studious fingertips that grow more brazen until he’s craning forward, kisses chasing one another over her collarbone and up her throat. She shifts, lifts up, slides one knee over his hip and then the other, pushing him back gently on the vinyl padded exam table and tugging, divesting him easily of his protective towel and every shred of his imagined embarrassment is absent. 

Left bare and tangled, locked in a frenetic kiss, sounds mingle in the meet of their mouths, wordless harmonics and hot mixed breath. They roll, and it’s a benevolent see-sawing skirmish for the high ground, the Doctor coming up on his elbows above her in a predatory crawl, all of his awareness and ambition boiled down to intense immediacy, the entire world is slick and shifting, hands raking skin, pulling and tugging and slow-motion desperation. 

It’s almost like a surprise, that somewhere in their naked grinding tussle he’s found himself already nudging inside her, caught in the natural dip of her entrance by positioning and motion. She rolls her pelvis under his, coaxing a sound from him, one hand a fist in his hair, the other gripped on his shoulder. She’s never worn her nails long, or she’d be drawing blood.

“Is this too fast?” He whispers in a rush, wanting with every cell in his body to be contradicted. With a convulsive swallow, he chases his breath and sense of reason for support. They’ve come this far; he won’t ask for more than she is giving. “Maybe this is too fast...” 

“How,” she lets out a huff of a breath that doubles as a laugh, the flash of her teeth behind her wet lips is hypnotic in the amber light. “How could it _possibly?”_

He replies inarticulately, a tiny breathless _oh_ when she pushes her hips up again almost impatiently, drawing him forward and simultaneously wresting away his analytical self-control. It sends him driving in all at once, sinking himself to the hilt and exhaling a mindless sort of sound into the hollow between her clavicles, something between a sob of relief and a breath of incredulous, overwhelmed laughter. 

The sound Rose Tyler makes cannot be chronicled. If his life were not limited, if he lived nine hundred or ten thousand more years, he would never forget it the way he would never forget his name. 

In the following savage blur, his tentative little pushes give way to something lost and reckless until he’s barely resisting the pull to slam into her like an animal, moving with an almost clumsy urgency. He breathes her name over and over to himself, like its the only word he can remember in English and maybe it _is_ , his vast knowledge dwindled down to sensation and possession, rhythms, the clinging velvet slide-drag where their bodies are joined. 

These long years of existence--so many of them left unremembered like hours spent asleep--an ugly conglomeration of loss and duty and politics, lectures and arguments and dire emergencies, negotiations and demagoguery and noise and constant motion, and now everything has boiled down to this white hot pinpoint of a moment with her calves hooked over his thighs and sweat gathering in the ravine of his spine. He catches her face, drawing her closer, forehead to forehead between chains of starved, lingering kisses. Half-swallowed moans have retreated further back into her throat, whimpers maturing into something pulled from deep in her flexing abdomen. Rose shifts suddenly, tilts, rolls and he's pulled under that primal undertow, gasping in the half-dark, clutching at the quickening orbit of her hips. The undulating silhouette of her body is thrown into high contrast against the neon riot of realities outside the vaulted skylights: the dandelion fluff of her drying hair, the line of her throat with her head thrown back, face toward the sky, mouth open around a mouthful of gorgeous carnal music. Her dark shape rocks expertly astride his hips with her hands fanned out on his chest, then his shoulders, switching at will to better accommodate her enthusiastic slippery bucking. 

It’s a snapshot from a fantasy, the thrill and the sensation so numbingly surreal that it all leaves his intellect paralyzed, and he can hear himself, the sounds he’s making as though he’s disembodied. His body is betraying him now, controlled entirely by instinct and the drive of desire, as bestial and dark and raging as only something so long caged could be. He reaches up to touch, to clutch, no longer like she's porcelain but flesh he's been agonized over for what feels like every moment he’s been breathing. Everything inside him is drawing tighter, pulling taut, his breath competing with his heartbeat until they’re chasing each other.

There is science behind this, all of this. Nerve endings and dopamine, testosterone, luteinizing hormones, the hypothalamus. He doesn’t think of any of it. Someone had once told him his sterile viewpoint took the magic out of the world, that he packed beauty down into numbers, parabolic curves, trigonometric equations, that he simplified love into neurochemical reactions--but that was wrong. 

Science _is_ the magic of the world. This is the proof. The golden ratio of imagined perfection that had for so long only consisted of longing fantasies of simple intimate freedoms he was not permitted. Because _they_ have been a science for so long, a string of numbers, an equation, two components fit together in some perfect way: beauty in the only way the Doctor truly recognizes it.

Somewhere, light years away, he can hear Rose’s voice. Not words, but an outcry, deep, almost guttural, her body spasming around him in a staccato pattern. Her rocking becomes erratic, and the breath-robbing tension that feels wound around his spine releases like a plucked string, resonating through him with a beautiful kind of violence and he cries out helplessly: a sharp, seizing howl. His spine bridges up under him, neck arching back, fingers gripping, face contorted into an open mouthed gasping gape of agonized bliss, and Rose catches the tail end of his cry into her own mouth. Blindly, he reaches to grasp the back of her neck, holding her in place and kissing her, still carried in the current of this frantic incredible thing that's happening to them.

And somewhere, an immeasurable distance away--lifetimes of light travel, generations distant and across the howling halls of the void, the other Doctor drops his teacup.

He is, momentarily, so outside of himself, his focus so acute that his mental periphery is like crystal. The telepathic window is still worming through the pinholes between the universes, and in the hallways outside the TARDIS galley, the other Doctor stands on trembling legs with snowflakes in his hair from the year 2059, clutching at the doorframe and blinking at the scatter of porcelain on the floor, short of breath for what feels like no reason at all. 

It's less than a coherent certainty and in only a second it’s gone, his entire mind gone blank and dark as interstellar space in the afterwards. Blissful as an afterlife he'd never believed in. Then he's floating back to Earth with all the imagined, languid grace of a falling feather. That slow, side to side shift. 

Rose is collapsed forward, her breath puffing warm behind his ear, fingers petting his skin, and he’s swallowed whole by an abyssal, friendly silence. His time sense has been quiet since he woke that morning, but now his mind is so clear. All the noise in his head, dwindled to a low babble that is really just the soft sound of rain.

A millenium of existence. Existence, not _life_. All that running. 

He can’t recall the last time he’s ever felt this absurdly happy. Even with the lancing pain in his arm, this moment laying naked and sweat-damp, limbs tangled on a medical exam table, both of them laying here with their lives running out like an overturned hourglass--dying without a care--it feels like an exaggeration but he’s not sure he’s ever been this brilliantly bloody happy. 

For the first time, he feels immensely sorry for the other Doctor in a way that distinctly doesn’t feel like feeling sorry for himself. Seven hundred years running from abstracts and corruption, the unending noise of power-plays and expectations and duty, looking just for this moment. This sweet, unburdened silence that he would never have thought to look for in something so wet and graceless as he’d remembered it in the archives of his mind. This fulfilled moment of quiet contentment and a life both simplified and complicated by mortality. This was a life from a dreamland; this was what those homemade gods in Gallifrey had denigrated. 

And in a life where he’s forever been accustomed to never getting what he wanted, there had come a point he hadn’t even been certain what he wanted at all. He’d once thought as long as he learned enough, ran fast enough, helped enough, saw enough of the universe--his life would take shape. It would have meaning. 

Seven hundred years in, and he knows life only has whatever meaning anyone endeavors to give it. That life is an opportunity, not a gauntlet. 

Eventually, instead of meaning he’d sought a void, a silence, a kind of artificial serenity in putting all his concentration on solving a continuous circus of obstacles one after another until all sense of self fell away; borderline megalomania as a shortcut to the euphoria of imagined perfection. He’d spent most of his life in perpetual motion because he’d wanted so desperately to be still. 

He was the Doctor. He made people better. Helped where it was needed. Fixed what needed fixing. 

But not himself. 

This is what the other Doctor had turned away from. Rose had wanted a goodbye, but his version of that final goodbye was something so much more than that...it was a gift of that coveted stillness. Rose had wanted a word; they had given her everything else.

And it would be Donna gone, right after. He couldn’t be sure how long she’d had before she’d begin to break down. But not long.

No words have passed between them for a long while now, only gasps and cries, only half whispers and ragged breath. 

His eyes are stinging, and Rose is moving away, reaching for the towel still strung across the far end of the big exam table, wiping herself clean and the idea of it, of all the basic things, makes him flush.

This is not the life of a Time Lord, even a low Gallifreyan. This is the life of a man, a human man. He’d spent so long after the war honoring old traditions out of guilt. Out of some kind of misplaced respect for his fallen people that he’d little shown while they were alive. He’d pushed away Rose because a proper Time Lord would never let these feelings consume him, these weaknesses, would never give a life to save something _lesser_. Would never even consider living a linear life on a single planet. Would never lie awake with fierce, painful longing thinking about how her teeth flash when she talks, they way she draws out words, the way she would laugh with her whole body.

The burn of eternity in love with a spontaneous, gorgeous flash of light. 

But he wasn’t proper. He’d never been proper. He’d spent the better part of a millenium letting traditions and laws and decrees force his hand, push him along in its current even when he kicked and fought against them, ran from them, all but broke them into pieces.

Then he’d destroyed it all; orphaning himself of everything that had made him. 

One single day without Rose, and he’d found himself standing under the Thames. One day and he’d regressed to that wall-eyed thing he’d been for decades until she’d smiled up at him in a London marketplace, offering him her company with a sad, self-deprecating little smile, thinking it wasn’t much when it was everything and then she was gone-- _gone_ \--irretrievable as in death, and just briefly, he’d wanted to be gone too.

_Why did you drown?_

Earlier, he hadn’t understood his own anger. His fury at what was really an accusation; a correct one. 

In that bubble universe, he’d drowned because he’d _meant_ to drown. 

Because somewhere in his head, for a fraction of a fraction of a moment he’d wanted to. And if he could see timelines with any kind of clarity, maybe he could see his very own fixed point of death that he’s defying moment by moment just being alive. The laws of time are nothing here in this temporal pocket, this world of without time or day or night, where there is only he and Rose, and no one, no Time Lords to say who has to die and who has to live on.

That world is gone. 

They’re all gone. They’d needed to be stopped for the safety and sanity of the collective universe and the billion-billion systems their twisted war had victimized and would forever without end. They are gone and he is still here, drawing breath and slick with sweat and immersed in this blissful silence, unbound by their laws and edicts and ancient mores and maybe that makes him some kind of winner, but for the very first time, it feels like it. The Time Lord, _victorious_. 

It’s a feeling that doesn’t last very long. When she catches his eye, in what light there is left, there is the shine of tears on her face. 

She’s scared. Alarmed. Maybe she doesn’t know who he is after all; this overwrought, delirious thing who had just engaged in a feverish and primitive carnal act with her on a medical exam table like an absolute raving animal. 

That shame that had been mysteriously absent before boils to the surface. It’s like losing cabin pressure at high altitude, all of the air sucked from the room and his lungs with a sound in his head like a gunshot. 

( _I’ve gone too far._ )

All this time he’s been so certain he’s not changed. Over the last years, inside the darkness of his mind and his hearts, inside everything he stood for and every value that had betrayed him over and over, something horrible had been growing. 

They are the same--this exists in both of them, and something terrible has happened. He can feel it, coming through the window. This isn’t his own grief. It’s all getting mixed, his ridiculous euphoria and anxiety and regret and this bone-snapping despair. The sense that he’s done something _unforgivable_.

There is no congruence to counting systems here. More time has passed in the old universe, for the other Doctor, and all that time he’s been alone, miserable, aching, going to pieces in pitiful slow motion. Like that night under the Thames when he’d regressed so completely, when he’d watched the falling water and wanted, just for a solitary second, for it to carry him away. 

_(We’re not just fighting the flood...)_

Because every second he’s alive, he’s crashing the party. Maybe it’s not true for only this version of himself. Maybe the flood will always come. 

Maybe falling out of sync wasn’t just an unfortunate accident. Maybe promising not to disappear was a promise he shouldn’t have made if he can’t keep it.

Rose reaches for him, palms on his face, lips against his. When she pulls back, she smiles, wide and bright. The tears, they’re happy. Joyful. It’s a concept he always seems to forget exists because it is the epitome of an involuntary and contradictory emotional response. That tidal wave of neurochemicals: dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline, all of his most bitter enemies, more to add to his ongoing list all the things he can actively feel infringing on his mental clarity. He studies her in the dark, adoring her with a startling, mind bending ferocity; her and the air she breathes and the ground beneath her feet. If only time never moved again and the world consisted only of this dim room and warm hands, the stars plummeting to their dark addresses, dwindling until there is only Rose and the Doctor and nothing else.

Her hands smooth his hair back, and against his mouth, what has the weight of the only voice left in the universe whispers to him on the edge of a laugh. “The world didn’t end.”

He tucks his face against her neck, rolls into the enfolding shelter of her arms, nodding, but he’s not so sure it didn’t. 


	10. Polkhoy Volk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "There is no such thing as an accident."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was beta read by the marvelous scullywolf. All errors, because I am an editing junkie that makes edits after being beta'd, are my own.

**10:  Plokhoy Volk**

Trying to decide between crushing apprehension and arrogant, ecstatic bliss is one of the more strange choices he’s had to make in his life.  Over the next technically unpassing hour, he does not land definitively on either option. 

He spends the better part of that time curled around Rose, tasting the twitch of her heartbeat hiding under the fine linen paper of her skin, dropping kisses to accompany a freckle on her sternum and the round of her shoulder.  It’s only half that time before he’s lured in again by the sweep and press of sweat damp skin; by her low, still-anxious laughter.  The chilled tip of his nose slides along the upturning bridge of hers to find lips already parted for a long, slow kiss that feels like falling, like time and space dissolve around them, like he is once again made only of energy and not a framework of flesh.  It’s a heady feeling, like a materialized dreamworld he never wants to leave.

Before he’s even cognizant of what he’s doing, he's palms down on the table above her, neck bent with her legs coaxed around him a second time with more confidence than before, chasing away the anxiety that’s trickled through from a reality whose well being he cannot and will not be indentured to any longer. 

Instead he seeks that foreign sensation of existence as a still life painting, where everything stops except for them, the sliding, the deep push-pull, the tangled limbs and sweat.  He’d think of a clever title for it all, this erotic impressionist canvas in his mind--something artistic and abstract and very physical--if his brain was at all running at any percentage of its typical capacity instead of inundated with dopamine and oxytocin. 

When that muscle-seizing moment arrives again, he pictures a mythological concept of a flat Earth, the sharp edge of existence ending abruptly and the whole of an endless ocean pouring over the side and into dark infinity.  A painting that could be called _The End of the World_ \--but on second thought, hardly a still life. 

He wilts in an imagined pink haze, eyes closed, blood evaporating along the tracks of his veins, burning up like lines of gunpowder.  In the quiet between labored breaths, she giggles, hands on his back and a smile he can hear flashing unseen over his shoulder.  “Whatever happened to not being able to wait even twenty minutes for stitches?”

He feels himself laugh, hears it even, but he’s almost disembodied by pleasure and exhaustion, existing in a state of higher consciousness but intoxicated by the slow damp petting of her hands on his naked back; the rise and fall of her expanding lungs, everything physical about her that’s naked and golden and grinning. This is a glimpse of the Rose that’s been waiting under the soldier’s posture and unflinching command, the shoulder bent under a weapon and eyes grown depthless and stark. 

“You _are_ persuasive,” he tells her.  “And I have become immensely distracted.”

“I remember when you groused at me because I just assumed you didn’t.”  She draws the word ‘assumed’ out, there is a smile in her voice that he loves hearing and loves thinking about and loves seeing when the flash of her white teeth cut through the shadow enough that he can discern her mouth.  He drops to his elbows and kisses it.

“I was talking about dancing.”

There’s that smile again, her head inclining far to the side.  “No you _weren’t_.”

“Rose Tyler.  That was a long time ago.  I can’t possibly be certain what I meant.  But.  To be fair, you _did_ just assume that I didn’t.”

"I assumed that after.  At least the dancing bit.” 

“Well,” he demurs, carefully pivoting on an elbow to settle to one side of her.  “As you recall, I simply stated that I _could_ .  Conditional.  Not that I generally, you know.  _Do._ Or _...did._ ”

The conversation is about to deteriorate strangely, he can feel it in the air.  His head swims a second while she blinks, biting her lip with her eyes cast low under her eyelashes.  “If you didn’t....or don’t...then why...”

“Why...?”

“Why didn’t you?  And why now?  Why...” she clears her throat and swallows just tightly enough he can hear every centimeter of her flexing throat.  “Why me?”

His voice jumps so high it nearly cracks.  “Why you?” 

“I just...I don’t want you to do things that are unnatural for you just to make me happy...”

“Did I give you the impression of powering through a chore?” 

“ _No_!”  Now she laughs, high in her throat.  “Just...”

“Rose, you don’t want to hear the entire gruesome detail of biological imperatives toward procreation for species whose life-expectancy spans centuries, appropriately limited-release gonadotropin and resulting societal stigmas based on lower caste behaviors.”

“Doesn’t sound much like pillow talk, I’ll give you that.”

“In any case, nothing that makes you happy could possibly be unnatural.  And it’s not so much unnatural.  Just... _unprecedented_.  Cross-species.  Though,” his shoulders jump with a sudden anxious-sounding chuckle, “I guess not as much as I’m inclined to believe.  Worth noting that interspecific...or rather I should say intergeneric cross lifeforms are almost universally sterile.  It’s a biological expedient, preventing gene transference.”

Rose erupts into loud laughter.  Her head drops back onto the bright blue vinyl padding, shoulders bouncing and from his angle, all he can see is the delicate triangle of flesh under her jaw, the long column of her throat taut with delicate tendons and velvet skin.

“I’d rather,” she wheezes, “I’d rather you not phrase it as though you’re a horse and I’m a donkey.”

“Not what I intended,” he corrects primly and she only dissolves into spasming, soundless hysterics.  “Besides.  I’d sort of be more of a _mule_.”

Rose laughs harder, rolling to her side and burying her face, the sound flattened by the interference of the vinyl and her folded arms.  She comes up on her elbows, breathless, face lost in a blonde tumbleweed.  “Alright, then, fine, you’re a _mule_ , you romantic git, but that’s not what I meant and you know it.  Wait--this hasn’t...happened to you before, has it?”

The Doctor is quiet a moment in the ringing afterglow of her merriment, like the silence after a peal of bells.  Resting his head on one folded up arm, peering over at her in the light that shifts like fireshadows.  “You mean the metacrisis?”

Rose’s breath puffs with the threat of more laughter, she twists her mouth to tamp down the impulse to laugh at the idea that she might mean anything else.  “Well, I _had_ meant the metacrisis--”

“I have to admit, it’s my first.”  He reaches for her, hands on skin in a new and thrilling way he knows he will never be entirely accustomed to, no matter how long he may have to try.  And after a quiet moment of embrace, Rose has lost the impulse toward levity. 

“I mean it, Doctor.  Why me?”

“Rose--”

“No, really.  I’m not stupid.  For a long time, I thought I was.  Most of my life, even.  It wasn’t until I met you...”  She shakes her head.  “I’m not even as idealistic as you might think I am.  I know you’ve been around so much longer...I can’t even begin to imagine what it’d be like, living that long.  You’ve been places, seen things I can’t comprehend.  You know details of... _I dunno_ , moon colonies and historic battles and things that I don’t even know _exist_ and I just...I wonder why you’d want to spend any time with me at all, much less...”

When she trails off, there is just the sound of rain, the robotic moan of wind breaking up against sharp-edged architecture. 

“Rose...” he begins, and his brain is buzzing with chemicals, fight or flight, the amygdala lighting up like a holiday display, and he can only excuse his failings.  “I am total rubbish at a few things.  Just a few, mind, but...that kind of...that’s one thing I just...I don’t know where to begin.  I don’t know what to say that doesn’t come out sounding all wrong.  There’s any amount of science behind why anybody does anything that explains virtually nothing at all when it comes to motivations.  Emotional responses ingrained over time.  Despite logic and justifications, there’s always an element that remains almost inexplicable.  Why does anybody do anything?  Why do we love what we love?  Why are we so drawn to things, to certain people?”  The Doctor clears his throat and shifts.   “Maybe it’s because we can’t help it, it’s just the nature of thinking things--to love something recklessly, to want to be close to it even if it’s supposedly wrong or--I don’t know--of if it can only end in misery.”

“So instead you walk away without saying goodbye?”  There’s an edge in her words, something that cuts, and this is not where he’d wanted this to go at all.  “It’s still goodbye even if you don’t say it.”

“I’m sorry I don’t have a better answer.  It’s a difficult question, I don’t know if I can explain.”

She makes a methodical, wet sound.  Like she’s licking her lips or opening her mouth to speak long before words actually come out.  “Bit rich, you not being able to explain something.  So...that’s all, the nature of things and all that?”

“It was like...finding a key to a locked door,” he says, eyes to the skylights now, feeling small and strange and once more gripped by the perpetually unnerving feeling that he is in over his head.  “I wasn’t looking for it.  Maybe I didn’t even realize the door was locked.  You are...the exception to everything I’ve ever known about myself.  You are an answer to a question I didn’t know, like something written in another language I couldn’t read and it was both maddening and spectacular and I _wanted_...”  His voice falters, the volume of it dropped so low it’s nearly inaudible.  He breaks off with a huff of frustrated breath.   “I’m not saying what I mean to say at all.”

It’s Rose’s hands on his face now, her voice thick in a way that reminds him of a holographic image of her windswept face, saying goodbye when she was already so far away.  It feels like a thorn lodging in his lungs to hear it.  “Yes, you are,” she says.  “What did you want?”

He swallows with some difficulty.  “Being with you made me feel...good.  Maybe that sounds simple to you.  But honestly, really good.  And...I hadn’t felt good in...oh, Rose.  Such a long, long time.  And then, just like that, you were gone.  And so was the feeling.”

There’s silence now, Rose winding herself around him again, the damp sound of her open-mouthed breathing. 

“Are you crying?”

“No,” she lies, then sniffs loudly. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, and he is.  She’s not crying for him.  Not this version of him.  Because no matter what, it will always be there, stretching long behind them like shadows just before sunset, like the echoing ache of an old wound:  the idea that he’ll never be entirely what she’d wanted.

“Stop apologizing.”

It’s a long time after before either of them speaks again.  They’ve both settled into each other as though this isn’t the most remarkable thing, their laying together nude on a padded exam table, exhausted and sweat damp with slow breath and closed eyes. 

“Don’t fall asleep.”

Nodding heavily, he tucks his cheek against her neck--though miracle of miracles, he almost _could_.  He’s got one foot in a dream already, standing balanced on a high cliff overlooking the end of the world with an ocean pouring off at a hundred-million gallons per second.   Donna is there, on an outcropping far below, standing face to the wind in a sodden wedding dress.  Craning her neck back, hands balled in tight fists at her side, she opens her mouth and yells up at him.

_"Doctor!  You can stop now!”_

He starts; blinks back the rising exhaustion, finding tears stinging in his eyes for reasons he doesn’t have the energy to question, and it’s another twenty minutes and one more painkiller before they make it out of the medical wing in Torchwood training wear salvaged from the laundry, walking slowly with fingers basket woven together and a damp warmth collecting between their palms. 

Still, he hasn’t decided between anxiety and arrogance yet, and walking up the ramp to the cannon module, he abandons both choices.

He freezes completely, another moment of still life and this one would be titled _Shock_.  Not just because the dimension cannon is a lot smaller than the preposterous contraption he’d envisioned by its name alone, but mostly because he’s seen it before. 

Or at least, he’s seen something like it before.  Something that gives off the same electromagnetic signature.  Remarkably like it.   But certainly not any more alike than it feels.  Certainly not. 

He’s moving forward like a fish on a hook, towed forward by his nauseated curiosity and grabbing the heavy binder from the console’s shelf.  It’s a terrible epiphany that’s an hour late; one that should have come when his mind was empty and time was standing still but is only now pushing its way through through the backlog of thoughts.

He opens the binder in the center, page forty-six of the program manual detailing the hardware breakdown, when the initial anxiety blossoms into dread.  Because every explosion has an epicenter, and they have just found it.

None of this was an accident.  There is no such thing as an accident.

 

What he’s looking for in those binders isn’t a thing she asks because he’ll answer.  He’ll answer and she’ll be no closer to knowing than where she was at the start, so instead she watches him, folded up ridiculously in the tiny glass-enclosed module control with the open binder in one hand, one long leg with the word TORCHWOOD trailing down the toward his bare ankle. Squinting from the black and white circuitry schematic to the open control board with his brows dropped low, his eyes snap side to side while he pages through in what looks far too fast to be reading. The lines of his face grow more taut by the second, the long shadows of his eyelashes stretch down his cheeks, spider leg long from the overhead lamp.  He looks surreal this way, lit up against the dark wall of machinery and readouts; he looks like something she would have dreamed up to crawl into her bed at half past midnight.

“The cooling unit implies maintenance of a critical temperature,” he says absently, enough that it’s unclear whether he’s addressing her or just thinking out loud.  “Restrictor plates keep a sub-zero temperature in the coil chamber.  Default setting point-zero-three Kelvin, it’s no wonder it needs a whole river working on a heat exchanger...” He exhales a low whistle, then face-faults almost comically into expressionlessness.    It’s several beats of silence before he continues in a strange, strangled sounding voice Rose isn’t certain she’s ever heard from him before.  It’s sepulchral.  Hollow. It inspires a disembodied dread that starts in her throat and sinks lower.  “It’s running a niobium chip.”

“And that’s...bad, is it?”

His mouth moves but no words issue.  It hangs on whatever unspoken thing has robbed him of every syllable he might use to communicate.  Like the thought is too big to fit through the meager opening of his mouth.

The world might end after all:  the Doctor is speechless.  Expressionless.  His face--she’s seen it lit up in anger and sorrow, features twisted into sneers and laughter and only recently contorted in breathless passion.  Now he’s just blinking at the manual contents, only half in English, his mouth hanging just open enough for breath to wheeze out from between his lips.  He reaches into his pocket and withdraws one of the yellow receiver pads, turning it over in his palm silently before setting it on the console frame.

“ _Doctor_.”

He clears his throat.  “This isn’t.  This shouldn’t... _exist_.”

“It’s an alternate world, Doctor.  I told you, loads of things are different here.”

“No.  No, that’s not what I mean.”  He shakes his head in slow motion, his voice coming out brittle and dry, like leaves breaking up in the wind.  “It’s not just a little off, Rose.  I mean, it’s _off_.  Practically a thousand years, and considering Moore’s law, that’s saying something.  This is _displaced_ technology, it has to be.  Tetranuclear niobium oxo-acetate chipsets aren’t even synthesised until 2817 in Old Earth chronology.  And here this is, running a niobium chipset cooled to just off absolute zero--Torchwood built a quantum mnemonic engine and it’s just.. _sitting here_ in this cellar...”

He stops, snaps his mouth shut almost audibly, his mind changing directions so abruptly she can almost hear tires squeal.  In the sallow light, his eyes come up from the binder text to settle on her, and when he speaks, it’s in that half-strangled way.  “You let them put you through this thing.”

And she means to, but she doesn’t answer right away.  Watching the expressions roll across his face is like watching storm clouds in time-lapse photography.  It can’t settle on any one thing.  It’s worse than when it had chosen none at all.  “It’s fine, Doctor.  It’s safe.”

“Safe!” he snaps, so loud and abrupt she actually starts from the sudden gunshot sound of it, reverberating back in the little glass-enclosed booth.  Immediately a hand scrubs over his face and through his hair, while he shakes his head with a kind of mirthless gust of laughter coming out with his breath. 

“Doctor, you’re scaring me.”

“This machine, Rose.  This _machine_ can perform 2^512 calculations simultaneously.  That’s more atoms than there are in the entire universe, and then some.  It generates probability variance at Planck scale using material cooled below critical temperature to negate the electromagnetic force and create a Meissner effect.  It expels all electromagnetic fields while the inside of the reactor reaches a superconductive state, below the rate of particle resonance.  Sound like anything you’ve heard before?”

She’s ready to shake her head, except, inexplicably, it does.  It rings a rusted bell in the back of her head, because it _does_ sound like something she’s heard.  Just where she’s heard it--that’s the part she can’t remember. 

“The reality bomb.  Torchwood’s Dimension Cannon is the essentially the same type of machine with a different power source.  Instead of single-string zed neutrinos, this thing pulls a couple million joules per second, you were right about that part.  But safe...no.  There is nothing about this that’s even remotely _safe_.”

With a breath, Rose shakes her head, blonde dandelion fluff fallen in her eyes that she swats away. “Waitwaitwait, hang on--”

“It stands to reason this isn’t a coincidence.  Us, trapped here, existing in a shorted out time differential.  The existence of something like this, this is the catalyst for all of it.”

“But...Davros... he wanted to _destroy_ everything.”

“Technology is neutral to concepts of morality.  Even the most well-intentioned discovery can and will be used for destruction eventually.  And the other way around.  You can use nitroglycerin as high explosives or to treat heart conditions.  Same difference.”

“I don’t understand.  How could it be the same?”

“It’s not the _same_ , just essentially.  The same way, oh, I dunno...a toaster is the same as a nuclear reactor.”  He gestures with the hand that isn’t holding the binder, floating in the air before landing on his head like a nervous bird.  “Same idea, different applications.  Both generate heat.  Different fuel source, same result on different scales.  Negate the electromagnetic force, matter just falls apart.  Nothing to hold it in its shape.  This machine uses the same kind of effect, but it uses its superconductive state to expose point-particle probability and manifest multiple states in macroscopic density.  Multiple realities. At Planck scale, gravity breaks down.  Probability field quantifiers at near sub-Kelvin temperatures slow particle resonance enough to expose multiple simultaneous states.  In _essence_ , this machine peels apart m-branes and--for the soul brave enough to walk in there--lets them walk right through to whichever specific state the operator solidifies.  Like walking through a two-way mirror.”  He shakes his head, flipping a page with an almost hostile jerk.  “It’s a great trick: exchanging particles with half-integral spin like electrons for particles with full-integral spin.  Like photons.  Gravitons.”

Rose’s throat has run dry.  So much of what he’s said means nothing to her; it’s just the way he’s said it all with an increasing tone toward anger.  Half-leaned inside the little glass booth, she watches him intently paging through the end of the binder, reading schematics that look more like pages of computer errors and strings of random numbers than they do any kind of parseable information.  Nearly four years she’s been at this, she’s buried her head in books and slept an hour a night and seen the sunrise from a hundred different versions of reality and in ten minutes he’s made her feel so wildly out of her depth as though they’ve never been apart.  It’s a comfort almost as much as it’s utterly maddening.

“They told me it measured timelines,” she says.  It feels like an inadequate addition to the conversation, but little of what he’s said has made any sense beyond the clear and obvious indication that the machine is not only dangerous but something bordering what he feels is impossible.

But impossible is just a word, and as a concept has rarely been more than a hindrance, in Rose’s experience.  She’s stepped over cracks in the ground more ominous than the word impossible.  And for the last four years until this morning when she’d woken to find everything tipped on its ear, Rose Tyler--the new _new_ Rose Tyler--ate impossible for breakfast.

“It could be said to,” he says heavily. Every word is a stone falling out of his mouth.  “Certainly.  A proficient operator could scroll through probability to find optimum states to solidify and send the coordinates to the receiver.  The receiver discs, they’re probability field quantifiers with radiation shielding, dematerializing matter via electromagnetic harness and reconstituting it to calculated supersymmetrical specifications based on highly specified coordinates...”

The Doctor stops talking but does nothing.  Doesn’t raise his eyebrows, doesn’t gesture.  He sits without words or motion for long minutes that pass like seasons before continuing in a flat tone that sounds like reciting something long memorized.  “It’s a quantum apparatus.  A nibioum-acetate powered superconductive device; this close to organic.  It can parse block transfer computations without adapting to their logic as law.  _Who built this?_ ”

Rose wants to reach out, but for whatever reason, doesn’t.  “I’ll introduce you to the team, Doctor.  God--they’re going to love you.”

“This machine could devour us.  Devour everything.  The fact that it hasn’t already...”

He’s staring at the binder pages, eyes glassy.  There are words on the page: _bosons_ and _superfluidity_ and _angular velocity_ but he does nothing, doesn’t elaborate or even look up.  His hair has fallen over his forehead and he leaves it. 

“This machine is our only way back, you said.”

“I said that _before_.”

“Doctor.  You’d rather--”

“If a malfunction of this machine, or--hell--just the ongoing use of this machine weakened the hold on wave functions...like...”  He puts out a hand, palm up, fingers flexed around something invisible while he thinks up a metaphor.  “Like stretching out something elastic so far it can’t pull back into its original shape.  Our coming here could trigger that.  Us with all our mass a whole second out of sync with the rest of this reality’s dodgy particle decay rate, setting off a chain reaction.”  Passing both hands over his face, he shrinks in the module seat, shoulders rounding.  “A machine that uses quantum entanglement to unravel timelines one at a time, like pulling a thread in a jumper--it’s going to weaken timespace around it.  And if we _don’t_ use it--”

With an visibly angry flourish, the Doctor powers on the monitor in front of him.  The power-up interface loading before the program initializes with a quick splash screen with the program name in Russian letters that look like a tangle of barbed wire, then the familiar plotter screen showing a digital clock-arm swinging in awkward orbits, leaving plotted trails in various colors that weave together in peculiar parabolic arcs with a long string of numerical readouts, statuses, temperatures.  Rose has never been certain as to how it works or why, but she knows what it’s displaying.  Watching it, he makes a sound that’s sharp and dismal.

“It’s a funny old life, isn’t it?  The things that come back around when they do,” he pauses, then wheezes out a bleak, unhappy laugh.  “Looking at this interface is like if I showed you what colors sound like.”

“Not sure I follow.”  What a surprise.  

He shakes his head.  “A visual representation of temporal chaos theory, it’s just...odd.  To look at something that’s...usually something in your head.  The Lorenz plotter model for values leaves a lot to be desired.”

Rose covers her face with both hands.  “Sometimes,” she says, with her voice muffled into her palms, “I wonder why I even bother asking.”

“Time is deterministic.  Look at this pendulum, see how it’s bent here, hinged to modify its center of mass.  Motion of a complex multi-dimensional metronome maps out generalized co-ordinates of gravity and inertia in a dynamic system.  Initial conditions are strong influences of resulting differentials.” 

He points to the screen along the colored trails left by the end of the swinging double-pendulum on a black background.  “Think of this point being, I don’t know, the moment you walked into the post office, or a coffee shop where you ran into someone you hadn’t seen in ten years.  While you’re talking, she mentions a position that’s just opened up at a company she’s just left.”  He moves his finger to a different colored loop.  “And here is where you interview for and are offered that job that your old friend recommended to you.”  He moves his fingertip further still.  “And here is where you meet the managing vendor that works with a branch of your new company.”

One more move to a blue loop along the outside of the increasing rat’s nest, and when he speaks again it’s dolefully; so profoundly sad.  “And here is where you get married to him.  You’d have never gotten to this loop,” and he moves his finger back to the first position, “if it weren’t for this one.  But we can’t take every opportunity to exist in a linear state.  Free will is an illusion of the organic mind.  Reality is just a consensus, what we’ve all agreed is real.  Just like we agree for currency to have value, or that laws are to be obeyed.”  With a punch of a keyboard function, he cycles through the different colored loops.  “There is no reality.  All these loops already exist, different variations, and just for now you can see them out the skylights.  You see them in your peripheral even here, pushing against the fabric.  Original values--starting points--have everything to do with resulting secondaries.  Infinitesimally small changes in original conditions can yield an enormous difference in long term results.  Like the difference of one minute on a cosmic scale, or five seconds.  A quarter of a second can be the difference between life and death.  A trillionth of a second in quantum time.  This is why the weatherman’s usually wrong.  This is why not even a Time Lord can look into these spirals of possibilities and see any one defined result to anything.  Only this.  What just _looks_ like chaos.” 

He gestures to the screen, and his voice is dark and heavy, like a storm cloud ready to break.  “This is a physical representation of an iteration function system to recreate a natural structure using inertia, kinetic energy and potential energy as stopgap values to represent aspects of eleven-dimensional spacetime but...”  He nods, eyebrows low and eyes severe as though any of that explained anything at all; as though he really expects her to understand any of this.  But even she knows, understanding isn’t the point of the Doctor letting his mouth run away without him.  He could well have come up with a less magnanimous story, one of car wrecks or derailing trains because you stayed too long at a traffic light or spent one more minute in bed. 

“This is a timeline plotter.  This is how they found Donna.”   With another movement of his long fingers, he points out a single point just above the pendulum where all the colored lines come together on their way back or away.  “Where all the timelines converged.  And right now, that’s us.  Eye of the storm, more or less.”

“More or less?”

“Well.  Maybe less rather than more,” he says.  “But maybe it just starts that way.”

Rose feels like throwing up.  All at once she wants to ask what else he can see, could see, could ever see about her, about them, about this moment right now.  But most of all, she wants to ask if the other Doctor on the beach knew that this would happen.  Or if he was too much of a coward to look at those spiraling colored loops in his stupid _selfish_ thick Time Lord head--

But in her own head, there’s poor Donna saddled in a heavy coat, covered in wires and straps. Surrounded by mirrors, she dissolves into shuddering half-swallowed tears while she stares down the nightmare that’s clutched to her back.  _“Turn it off,”_ she begs. _“Please.”_

Rose has studied chaos theory as it applies to her travels--initial points, cause and effect, the butterfly effect of correlating points and the causal nexus.  She understands, but she doesn’t.  And maybe she’s had enough of seeing other realities, everything that could be, everything that _is_ \--all that potential for suffering held in that swinging pendulum.  She couldn’t stand it in her head, never able to turn it off.  And maybe it’s unfair to think he’d want to see it either.  That he’d even want to look at what he’d decided he couldn't have. 

“You can graph any dynamic system.  Rise and fall of water levels in a river network,” he says, eyes focused on the screen while he cycles through input fields.  “Wax and wane of animal populations.  Disease epidemics.  Graph any deterministic system and patterns emerge.  You find recurrence plots, cycle limits and strange-attractors.  Everything’s a number.  Graph any system and the results approach...” and here, inexplicably, he laughs, like it’s suddenly clear there’s no point in explaining.  Or trying to explain. “Someone spent a long, long time designing this machine to determine those cross points in possibilities and to open them up and deposit someone into _that_ coordinate of time.  It’s...the most dangerous thing I might have ever seen in my life and you’ve been just launching back and forth like it’s nothing.”

“Enough already.  I had to do something.  You should know I didn’t build this bleeding thing, but having a kind of purpose--I don’t know what I would’ve done otherwise.  They’d been designing it a long time before I got here, but it gave me, I dunno.  Hope?  Something to focus on; something worthwhile.  It was something that actually felt familiar, I could immerse myself in it and I just felt...  And then the things we observed.  Timeline activity dropping with no observable cause.  Bloody stars _vanishing_ , whole galaxies.  One by one, more every day, I suppose you’d just ask me to stay put because it’s too _dangerous_ and expect someone else to help, yeah?  Who?  There isn’t a Doctor in this universe!”

She’s no faster said it than his shoulders have drawn up tight, everything about him gone tense and wooden.  A muscle at the junction of his jaw twitches, and his eyes fall back on the dimensional receiver disk sitting on the edge of the console. 

“Doctor...I didn’t mean it that way.”

“I guess you said it best, Rose.  There’s no Doctor here, you might as well take the title.  Good job of it too: leather jacket, a blatant and intentional disregard for your own safety.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“I’ll talk how I like, thanks,” he deflects, and there’s a bittersweet familiarity to his words.  He hasn’t sounded so much like that old self in ages.  All that’s missing is a Northern accent.  Perhaps he would say the same of her. 

_(“This is who I am.  Right here, right now, alright?  All that counts is here and now, and this is me!”)_

Maybe she’s always been in doubt of who he is, from the start, from the very beginning.  He is both caprice personified and world-defining unto himself, the question and the answer: a dichotomy that is nothing new.  Not ten minutes before they were nude, locked together in the intimacy of breath and sweat, broken voices and shared humanity, and now once more, she barely knows him at all.

Swallowing conflicting impulses to strike or embrace him, she breathes in slowly through her nose, then out her mouth. It’s a relaxation technique, learned in therapy between rounds of attempted treatments she’s refused because he’d called it _companioning_ ; it makes her think of memorized terms like “complicated bereavement” and “pathologic grief”.  Back during those blurry months where she could only tell time by the appointments: one week equalling another trip to see Gary in his suit and leather chair.  That was before Pete had brought her in on the D-Cannon project.  Before she’d had a reason to get out of bed at all.

With a grim face, he keeps entering data, strings of numbers, more of that incomprehensible library of values and variables filed away in his brain. 

“Doctor.  Please.”

“Those disks, Rose, the field quantifiers.  You don’t use them for the initial jump through the engine, do you?”

He’s not going to address it, that’s clear.  He’s not even looking at her.  “Only once you’re out of range, yeah.”

She watches him blink, his eyes on the screen but not looking at it.  “Yeah,” is all he says at first.  It takes him another minute, surveying that swinging pendulum and its pixelated rainbow loops, flipping back through schematics in the open binder and back to the readout before his presses his lips together, puffs out his cheeks and sinks into the stiff-backed task chair in a kind of deflating slow-motion.  The Doctor breathes in, then out.  He has his own way of dealing with grief.  It’s a moment before he reaches for her, gathering her against him in the tiny booth, leaning into her embrace and every touch of her hand with the intensity of a neglected cat. 

“And when you send more than one person,” he continues quietly, speaking close to her ear.  “You do one at a time, twenty minute cool down between each.  You can jump simultaneously once they’re through. Right?  Out of range?”

Rose nods.  “The initial power-draw isn’t enough to safely process more than one person’s mass and link it to their receiver, I’m sure there’s a better explanation in there if you care to look it up, afraid I’m not quite an expert--”

And she trails off.  The Doctor is staring at the floor, the smallest shiver of liminality visible even in the polished concrete, like a two light sources shifting back and forth intermittently; like a fluorescent light with a bad ballast. 

Neither of them have to say it aloud.  She knows. They have to go through one at a time. 

It’s a conglomeration of misfortunes, a collection of results moment by moment, but not an accident. 

The damaged cooling system, the observer effect, the liminal prison that swallowed Jackie Tyler.  Probably going much further back, those wider reaching arcs of probability, the existence of worlds and civilizations, constants and variables that span millennia. 

Time is deterministic.  One second can change everything, and this is their reality even though neither has conceded to it.  Rose surprises him by tugging back, she meets his gaze with placid eyes, the color of honey and he wants to fall into them.  Wants to close his eyes and fall, like dropping off that plummeting edge of the world as he’d once imagined, everything fading to black and they could both wake up somewhere oceans away where it’s already tomorrow.  Where all of this is over.  Where it never happened at all. 

This machine is temptation given shape.  The kind of temptation that devours principle and time.  Devours finality and causality, rewiring reality, a display of everything that is, that was, that ever could be. 

And somehow, he should have known.  With the manual still in his lap, the Doctor pages numbly back to the manual title page.  It’s the same cyrillic characters he’d seen flash by so quickly on the power-on splash screen that he’d simply passed them by, the name of the plotter program: плохой волк.  _Plokhoy volk._

_Bad Wolf._

It’s correlation versus causation.  Here at the heart of things; what came first, the program or the entity, Rose Tyler or the Dimension Cannon, the chicken or the egg, the locked door or the key--all of it here, inextricably linking them with every fiber of the warp and weft of the temporal vortex.  It’s so easy to forget that he doesn’t turn the cogs of time. 

Forever and ever, they are turning him; _every_ him.

And he could rewrite everything, every second since that tent in Shan-Shen or even before; he’ll unmake himself entirely before he’ll leave Rose behind again.  Here where there is only the two of them in the whole world.  Where there are no Time Lords, no laws of time except in his head. 

She’s been speaking, but he hasn’t heard.  He’s still staring down at the manual title page, his head clamoring too loudly to let anything through the grind of his thoughts.  To get his attention, still halfway leaned into the open module booth, Rose reaches up to the glass beside her face, and she knocks.  Four times.


	11. Eurydice's Footprints

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Enormous thanks to the fabulous ScullyWolf for patiently betaing this chapter.

**11:Eurydice’s Footprints**

 

It’s a soft little knock, knuckles on glass, but when it hits his ear it’s a gunshot.A ten gun salute; cannon fire.The eruption of fireworks, of war.This cacophony, this head-ringing explosion that’s got his blood pressure soaring, lungs squeezed tight, heart galloping out an adrenaline overdrive: it’s imaginary.Nothing’s happened, not yet.  

It could, he supposes, have been anything.A delayed reaction to painkillers.Exhaustion.The discovery of a semi-sentient quantum mnemonic engine called Bad Wolf that has shaped the edges of his life for years like wind erosion.  

But there’s something he recalls so vaguely: some dream, some half-remembered thing that stalked the jungle of his restless sleep.  

No.Not dream.Not sleep.A hallucination.A picture in his head.

A double-decker bus.The smell of hot vinyl and the powdery grit of sand.An increasing feeling of unease.And something about knocking.A warning. 

What he’d only thought was a hallucination, a glimpse through a telepathic window between his current and original selves.But none of it explains the surge of absolute primal fear where he feels like he’s suffocating inside his own skull.

When he looks up, at Rose, she’s smiling down at the binder still open to the program credits page, oblivious to what he supposes is just some kind of panic attack.She reaches, touches the printed cyrillic letters with the tip of her index finger.On her face, it’s the kind of smile that doesn’t go all the way to pinch up the edges of her eyes.  

“The program,”she says, inclining her head.“I named it.You can read it, right?Even without the translation circuits?”

Of course he can.And of course she did.The Bad Wolf creates itself.Here’s just the far end of one of those colored loops, the swinging pendulum connecting its own loose ends to make a circle.The ultimate ontological paradox, the only possible exception to the second rule of thermodynamics.An idea cannot age; words are unaffected by entropy.  

It’s made his hands go cold, these things in time and space he can’t fit inside his head.Loop anomalies, entities of energy.The realization comes with a sinking feeling, a kind of nebulous haunting dread that crawls hand over hand up his spine.With his throat dry, he nods, avoids her eyes to hide the burn of tears he’s blinking away.  

There’s a loose leaf notebook paper, folded and pressed under the title page like a bookmark.It’s handwritten in different pens, some blue, some black, some felt tip, one pencil.The sentences bend like they were written without a solid surface. 

25 Sept 06: v2--Junction of Little Sutton/Ealing Road, right toward Griffin’s Parade

24 Dec 06 v1--Thames flood barrier/v2 Public House Pub

4 Jun 07 v2--Chiswick, Chowdry Raffle Ticket

25 Dec 07 v2--Firborne House Hotel

14 Aug 08 v1--Adipose Industries/v2--Number 29 Runswick Place, Leeds, West Yorkshire

19 Sept 08 v1--UNIT/v2--Torchwood, Sontar (*Telescope)

10 Oct 08 v2--(Betelgeuse, Bellatrix, Rigel, Salph)Hilltop, Leeds

_25 Sept 06, 10:01 AM: v1_ \--Little Sutton Street/Ealing Road--LEFT toward Chiswick Highroad.  

“The machine leaves traces of itself?”Somehow, he barely recognizes his own voice.  

“An energy signature: the encoded name of the program.It’s so the machine can track where it’s been, events it’s accessed.And operators can recognize the hallmark in-universe, like an editor’s mark.”

“So it’s been you all along.”It feels ominous when he says it, although the sentence rides out on what’s almost a laugh.It’s like he’s accusing her of something.“You were always this...”

_Waiting for me.All this time._

For whatever reason, he feels raw and heavy, made of stone and hot coals, gravity pulling everything inward, compressing like the remains of a dead star. 

Rose, she’s pretending now, pretending not to know this is the end of the line, that this is the bottom of the well with nowhere to go but back up.And not together.She smiles, but not really.

He’s already been cycling coordinate sets, familiar with the control after a few minutes of studying the interface, number pairs specific to spacetime variables.Digits that represent a given planet in a given orbit length around a specific star out of a septillion at a certain point in its orbit around its galactic center all at the rate of a few hundred-thousand miles per hour. Everything is moving, hurtling through space, every moment a slingshot toward their final inevitable destination and _this_ is what they’ve come for.This is why they nearly drowned.And they cannot stay in this bubble universe, this unstable temporal pocket, no matter how much now he would want to try.

Because this is what he gets.  

“Rose,” he begins, still jittery.There’s something in his head that’s clamoring, the peal of warning bells too loud to hear even the warrior’s march of his own heartbeat. “You remember what I said, earlier...how...this is a state where collapsed mass shouldn’t exist?And interaction with surrounding matter is critical because it limits the amount of simultaneous superpositions with which you can interact?The observer effect?”

“That attack we both had.Like vertigo, I remember.” 

“Did you see anything?During that time?Any kind of, I don’t know.Dream isn’t the right word.”

“Like did I hallucinate?”

“Maybe?Yes.” 

“I don’t... _think_ so. Not sure I remember properly.I felt more like I was getting off a ride at a funfair, just...you know. _Worse_ ,” she drawls, pulling half her bottom lip into her mouth and worrying at it a moment.“It’ll be a problem, won’t it, after you go through?”

His head jerks toward her so fast, just for a moment it feels like it will disconnect and launch off his neck and go tumbling end over end across the floor.“After _I_ go through?”

“Doctor,” she says, and drops into a crouch, her hands clutched on the doorframe and then on him, crawling closer to look up into his face with her eyebrows pinching together on her forehead.“You said, from the other side, you could find Mum.Why couldn’t you find me the same way?” 

His mouth works, but nothing comes out.On all accounts, she’s right, and he could, but he won’t.He can’t.His stomach knots around itself at the suggestion.

“I just need some time.Just a little, to find another way.If I dismantled--”

“And what if it never works again?” she spits. “What if you need parts, tools, something we can’t get here?You said it was unstable, that this whole reality will collapse.You didn’t even want to wait for stitches, now you want to wait to rebuild the machine?”

It’s true.All of it, and he flushes at what’s implicit in her words, the questionable nature of his caution when contrasted against what he had been willing to wait for.He can’t argue, and he can’t explain it, but he’s not going through and leaving her.What he is going to do...the only thing his conscience will allow, every instinct tells him not to discuss it.To just make it happen.It’s easier to apologize than ask permission.Someone had told him that once, and it seemed like it was true.

And it goes against everything he’s promised himself about Rose.About this last chance he’s been given, about not deciding things for her.About saying goodbye.

He drops his hands.For slow-motion minute, he does nothing at all.Doesn’t speak.Just stares, head down, shoulders forward.  

“Rose...what if...”he clears his throat, tries again with his eyes on the plotter screen, the multi-layered rat’s nest of interconnecting arcs that are easier to look at than the expression she’s about to make.“What if we sent you through first?”

“Not gonna happen.” 

“I have a better chance of dealing with the disorientation...I can’t be sure what will happen, what that does to a body.What it will _feel like_ , Rose.I can’t let you test it.”

“Oh, so then it should be you? You’re human now, you may fare just the same as me.”

“Just a bit human, _thanks_.I still have adapted biological equilibriums to disagreeable climates, partial vacuums, extreme temperatures, brain chemistry evolved to acclimate to temporal flux. The Time Lord genome _evolved_ to withstand temporal anomalies, Rose. And we have to choose one of us, don’t we? Either I go through and try to fish you out or I send you through and follow. Though you’ll have immediate recognition with Torchwood operatives and I’d likely be isolated until Pete could vouch for me... _if_ Pete would vouch for me. You said it yourself:we can’t stay.We came here for this.We risked our lives.So let me send you through.That way, you’ll be safe--”

“Oh _no_.No, Doctor, you aren’t doing this to me--not again. Not _again!_ How many times are you going to send me away for my own good against my will?”

He heaves out a breath.No matter who leaves, it’s gone both ways, and he’s just falling into another old habit.There’s no denying, he’s both sent her away and left her behind, and never even turned to look back.Never said goodbye.   

He reaches, both hands circling her wrists to tow her back into the tiny glass control booth.“This is different.”

“No, it’s not.”

“I’m _asking_ you, Rose.”

“And I’m saying no.I don’t want...”She doesn’t finish, only collapses forward like a falling tree, hands over her face before making fists around handfuls of her hair.“I can’t.Not after all this.You go through and find me.I know you can, Doctor, I trust you to _find me_.”

He closes his arms around her, the open binder trapped between them, D-rings pressing uncomfortably into his abdomen while semi-resists, and he can’t help himself.

“Do you, though?” he asks into the blonde cloud of her hair.“Trust me?”

With the apple of her cheek balanced on his collarbone, she nods before looking up.Desolate and wet-eyed; she intends to look angry at the question but can’t quite manage it.  

“What if you don’t, though?"

“Don’t...what?”

“What if you _don’t_ have those things?Your brain chemistry...biological...things...what if you don’t have them, and you’re just as vulnerable as I am?It happened to you, same as me.What if I go through and you’re too incapacitated to work the controls?What then?”

“I'd know it, Rose. You're overestimating the quantity of human structures the metacrisis spliced into my genome. But. In that case...the...same way you imagined I’d be able to find you.”

“That’s not an answer.I imagined you’d have built some kind of gizmo out of copper wire and drinking straws that could track me down, translate Arabic to Portuguese and melt chocolate in one go.”

He laughs teeth flashing in the half-dark, eyebrows springing toward his hairline.

“The cannon is all we need.We’re in the right place, but in-between seconds.This machine peels all that apart, like stretching fabric to its limit, until you can see the warp and weft--every space between the threadwork.You said as much yourself. It can track anything given the right start point.The swinging pendulum, Rose!We pinpoint a theoretical continuum coordinate running one second ahead of us to properly calibrate with the boson decay of the surrounding matter, calculating for planetary trajectory, stellar drift, galactic torsion, time dilation...”

When Rose looks uncertain, he continues.“Remember what Byron said?They couldn’t get a lock on on the event-time of our location. Their coordinates could only correspond to an event in Euclidean space, not the degree of temporal separation.But we have all this power here in front of us.We have _Bad Wolf_.We just need to move, one geodesic second forward at the _same_ invariant spatial interval, and in doing so, our particle decay rate can synchronize with the proper relative frequency.That’s all. _C'est tout._ Just twenty minutes without an observer, and I reset the navigation relative to my start position.At worst, I’ll only be a second or--well, not far behind you.”

“Sort of like 1879 instead of 1979, huh?Werewolves instead of Ian Dury?”

“We still _saw_ Ian Dury, after.You liked the werewolf, Rose. _And_ you won ten quid--”

“Cardiff instead of Naples?1953 London instead of New York?Wrong year, wrong city--you can’t blame me for doubting your maths."

“It’s not _my maths_.Time cannot be traditionally separated from spatial coordinates,” he scoffs.“All physical phenomena happen independently of the reference frame.Mathematically, spacetime is a single manifold consisting of events, occurring at a certain spatial location at a certain interval--these restrictions correspond to a particular mathematical model which differs widely from Euclidean space in its manifest symmetry.”

“You’re just trying to confuse me.”  

“No!”The Doctor steps back, inhaling slowly, passing his hands over his face, fingers pressing into the globes of his eyes before plowing back through his hair and hanging clutched like bony spiders on the back of his neck.“Rose, it’s important you understand.Every event that exists is spatially linked to an immensely specific coordinate.Every _where_ has it’s own _when_. Everything is barreling into oblivion at a thousand miles per second, wobbling through space in helixes and spirals, every coordinate in Minowski space changing by the microsecond with only the gravitational force to thank that they keep in any kind of constant pattern.If I’m a couple years or miles off, it’s still an astonishing accomplishment of mathematics and ingenuity.”

Rose resists a thin smile.“That doesn’t make me feel better.”

“ _What I mean is,_ your Torchwood scientists, they might tell you--you know, let’s just pretend, just for a second, _hypothetically_ , I don’t come through after you.You’ll need to explain to your cannon team they need to set the coordinates for something that doesn’t exist.Rose, think about it.If there was a viable way to extract us from here from where they are now, they would have done by now.”

Her encroaching smile fades.“Doctor.What are you saying?”

“I’m saying--timespace is a widely considered a single abstract.Time doesn’t move independently from space.Their coordinates will account only for this, time and space as a single piece instead of...”He mimes a shape with his hands, like outlining the perimeter of an imaginary ball, but frowning and abandoning the developing analogy mid-gesture.“We have to set this machine to deploy at an event that doesn’t exist in their concept of the science: a coordinate that’s exactly the same spatially, but with a second forward only in the temporal separation.They’d tell you that you can’t, that compensating for the time will automatically compensate spatially and send you two-hundred-thousand miles out into space where the Earth was one second before.”

With increased agitation, he’s biting down on the impulse to pace the room.“Trust me.They didn’t build this machine on their own blueprints. They _can’t_ have.This proposed solution, Lorentzian coordinate transformations and geodesic vector tangents go against everything they know.I’m not saying it’s not possible, it _is_ , from the other end, it’s just the same idea in reverse.I just...it would take some time to convince them to allow it, and for all that, you’d be here.Human biology in liminal space, setting aside the mental strain, everything points to pain on an exponential scale.And unlike your mother, Rose, you’d be awake for it.This is why I have to do this.This is why I can’t go through and leave you behind-- there are too many variables, too many scenarios where I’m not able to extract you without difficulties and red tape.Leaving you here--waiting, all that time.”

“This is all because you don’t trust Torchwood?And what about my _mum_?”

He deflates loudly, lets out a lungful of air.“Not all because, not even half-because, but I won’t be entertaining a new opinion of Torchwood just now, if you don’t mind.I said, it’s possible and she’s asleep--not even an observer to herself, in stasis.We can do a biologic signature sweep of the spatial coordinates of the hotel in Bergen for the zeroed out Euler characteristic.”

“And if you’re not right behind me?If I come through and you don’t show up, I’m not waitin’ five and a half hours--” 

“Rose.Please.There are so many reasons--Torchwood protocol is only one.Got myself into a load of trouble in the past assuming agencies will just let me have free rein of their sensitive billion-pound equipment to execute maneuvers their understanding of science forbids.My biology is better equipped to handle liminal space.I’d feel...far more confident going about it from this end.”

She closes her eyes and inhales slowly.She seems to count, to wait a long moment before reopening them, and when she does, they have changed.Her tears have blinked away; she’s resolute.Wearing her soldier-mask, she gives an almost imperceptible nod.“Don’t be a couple years off.Not even a day.Can you promise?”

“The solution proposed virtually prohibits error,” he gestures to the screen, the Bad Wolf interface, and she doesn’t reply.Instead, the air feels dense, cold, like clouds passing over the sun.A quiet, almost imperceptible change in the air like the first day of winter or a shift in barometric pressure.  

Slow and mechanical, in the tense silence that’s settled around them, he initiates a trajectory scan, then begins entering coordinates worldline-centric to the local galactic meridian.

_Long: 179°, 56’, 39.4’’_  
Lat:0°, 2’, 46.2’’  
 _Dist: 7,940±420 parsecs/25,900±1,400 light years  
_ _Loc: 51.5036° N, 0.0183°W_

With fingers made of lead, he runs a subtraction equation to strip out the time differential, and in the empty field, enters _-0.01_ , bypassing the inevitable warnings.Emotion is catching up with him now, like air rushing back into a vacuum.It’s tightening around his throat while the interface maps out a different imaginary noose: the predicted loop of the double pendulum that should sort everything.The trajectory of the future.Life as it can be remodelled.  

With a few more one-handed maneuvers on the keyboard, the warm up sequence shifts to auxiliary, the mechanical beast lighting up with full power and without words, he holds open his hand for her to take.He wiggles his fingers at her, and quietly, she puffs out a sound that’s almost but not quite a laugh.  

Hands clasped, it’s the slowest, quietest walk to the module base, a ten-foot by ten-foot black box with an open glass-inset door, the inside lined entirely with mirror and an almost palpable fluorescent glare.

Rose turns in the open doorway, silhouetted by gold light, and he’s seen this before. 

_(“_ I looked into the TARDIS, and the TARDIS looked into me. _”_ )  

The traveller and her machine, the vessel and her namesake, inextricable from each other--the other side of his own coin.Somehow, it’s only appropriate.  

“I went back,” she says.“Six different times, after Donna told me you were dead. I thought maybe, I’m just not getting there early enough.That Christmas Eve.I went back, a week, two weeks before.But no, it...it was so much further back than that.The point of intervention.That thing on her back.That one little change that goes through everything.It’s like, the future you have today isn’t the one you’ll have tomorrow.Everything you do every day...

like dropping a stone in a puddle, yeah?All those ripples?That’s how this machine works.It maps out all those little waves, and it finds where they originate, like you said.And then I go there...”

“I went back--” she repeats, shuffling her feet.“The basement at Henrik’s, at closing time.”

“Rose, your own--”

“It was an _accident_.When we started trials, the machine could only teleport.It could move us around in our own building, so we tried further each time.First in distance, then time.When they wanted to test a different year...they wanted something specific.A time and date and exact location.It’s what came to mind, so...there I was.It should have been the alternate world.Where I wouldn’t have been.Neither of us.But there I was, standing in the dark, watching myself meeting you.It’s how we found out about the holes.How there were places we could get through.It’s how we knew the walls were thinning out.  

“From there, we did more test runs.I tried to think of random points we’d been, so I could verify, you know.Not interact, just...We tried the power station in Cardiff, the street in 1987 where my dad died.The day in 1945 where we met Jack.I knew I’d be able to tell exactly which world it was if I could recognize things I’d seen already.I didn’t even realize at first...everywhere I went, I was leaving a path.A message, with the call signature.Without even knowing it at first, I was leaving a path for myself to follow.I went everywhere I could remember going, further and further.I went to the Gamestation.”

“You could have paradoxed yourself right out of existence.”He bites out that last word, drawing the syllables between his teeth in anger.  

“I could’ve done.But didn’t.Instead, without what I did, we wouldn’t be here now.There’s a timeline where you finished that Delta Wave.The temporal static made it inaccessible.There’s a timeline where we never met at all.Where I made it out the door before being asked to take the lottery money.Another where Wilson was still alive when I did.A million different versions of the same fifteen seconds--”

“Oh!It parses timelines in fifteen second intervals?” he interrupts, jumping from severity to enthusiasm fast enough to give anyone whiplash. “Is the navigation based on the Gabor Patch tests?”

Rose bursts into a tearful smile, a breath of laughter slipping through her teeth. She goes up on her toes, hands on his face, mouth against his.Somehow, it still surprises him every time.If he dared to hope past the next twenty minutes of his life, he’d hope that one day he’d be able to kiss her without being flooded with desperation.Without the knee-jerk certainty that it will be the last time he ever will.

But he can’t lie to himself; it could very well be just that.So he kisses her like it’s the end of the world, folding himself around her.She crawls her fingers into his hair, gripping, holding on.

And without saying it, this is what goodbye really feels like.Frantic embraces in a doorway, forgetting to breathe between the release and reconnect of mouths, white knuckles and swallowed tears: this is the kind of choking regret that words cannot transcribe.This is where spoken language breaks down, where it just becomes syllables and letters.

But goodbye is just a word.Like forever.Like love.

“Rose Tyler, _I love you_.”It’s an admission that feels surreal on his lips, words that taste like salt and beach sand, like the atomized carbon-ash of a dying sun.They’re too small and not enough, and for whatever reason he can’t discern, they sound so much like an apology.With his forehead against hers, he closes his eyes, but can’t think of anything better to say.

Saying it aloud, not as some kind of trump card to win a competition with himself--well, he’d expected it to feel like something.A gust of relief or completion, a sort of epiphany, but instead he just feels empty and dark, like a sky without a star.

“Doctor,” she whispers, and he’s crushed under the weight of her voice.“You didn’t promise.”

“I know,” he says, and kisses her a last time.“Better be quick.”

In the bright glare from the open door of the mirrored chamber, her face is wet with tears.They grip each other another moment before releasing,and Rose walks inside the transmission module with a peculiar, stiff gate, the door sealing on a tripwire sensor behind her.From the control booth, he can see her while he calls up coordinates from memory, fingers moving, deft and efficient as if nothing is wrenching him in half.  

Nine hundred years of time and space, awe and wonder but more often misery.A life lived running, seeking to participate with all the doom that’s out of his control, a dance with the inevitable, a life lived for others and so rarely for himself.Luck has seldom given him even a noteable passing glance except in this glorious second chance, like being granted an afterlife.This magnificent gift, this reward in disguise as a punishment.

But no.Like everything has always been, he will sacrifice everything because he can’t promise anything.Because the terror he’d felt before was real, and he’s stretched the truth to convince her this is the safest option for them both.  

Because this is who he is.  

And this is what he gets.His reward.And it’s not fair.  

When he initiates the activation sequence, he fights for breath.He will always lose; it was foolish to think this would be any different, that the universe wasn’t out to punish him anew.It’s possible he’ll lose everything, even this wonderful pathetic body.

_This body was born out of death.All it can do is die._

The Doctor bites hard against nothing, jaw clenched until it aches, and he presses deploy on the hadron-chronon generator.His shoulders jump only once with the effort it’s taking to keep ostensibly calm and dutiful.

From inside the booth, far away through the heavy reflective walls, the sound of Rose’s voice.Her hands are flat, spread against the glass inset in the module door.He can’t make out the expression on her face while she calls out, but catches the words:  

“Don’t look back!”

There’s light and a sound, a great roaring hum like something massive passing overhead.His equilibrium faults in the wake of the power surge, surrendering to a hot rush of dizzy nausea.Somewhere inside that eruption of light, Rose has vanished.  

In the massive and deep silence that follows, there’s the limping human heartbeat that’s left behind, rushing in his ears, solitary and lonesome like a cry in the dark.  

He only has to make it twenty minutes before the cooling sequence completes and the system will reactivate.He fights to look up, toward the empty module but the motion of head inspires a thunderclap of vertigo.His vision blurs, threads of uncertainty twitching between his fingers, a google of timelines wavering around him, his own wave functions unravelling and expanding, traveling in every direction at once, like something dissolving in water. 

Without an observer, with the magnetic force haywire, mass capability fragmented, he spills to the floor.He feels, but cannot hear himself cry out.

With every muscle snapped tense, the agony wells up like liquid in his throat.He can taste blood.It’s a feeling like his bones are heated like iron over a flame, glowing orange-red, his flesh melting off them like candle wax.He’s being scattered, split molecule by molecule, taken apart.

“Carrot juice,” a voice says, and he looks.Leaning over the console in a long ago TARDIS desktop theme is Melanie Bush.He hasn’t seen her for hundreds of years.In her own timeline, she is long dead.She holds out a glass, almost shaking it at him.“I’ve told you before,” she says.“Looking after your health is important even for a Time Lord.Vitamin A, Doctor.”  

He takes it, sneering at the bright liquid with an old familiar sort of disdain.Everything feels different.Everything.The pain, the wave functions trembling around him like a furious black blizzard, it’s all still there, but also it’s not.

“I tell you, it’s making me go colorblind.”

“Rubbish,” Mel says, squinting around first and then straightening up and dissolving in front of him.Instead she’s Tegan Jovanka, practically tearing out her hair.“Why do you always have some _incomprehensible answer_?"

His stomach twists inside him, and everything jumps ahead.In a field, staring into black space, Ace wipes her eyes with the back of her wrist.She places a hat--his hat--back on her head and stares into the field.He takes the hat back. 

“Mine, I believe.”  

Tegan is gone.She was never there.  

Jump back. A voice, yelling through a wall and the rumble of vibrating; the twist of the toxin crawling through him, the feeling of chasing death down before it reaches him.Or Peri.Because this is all his fault, and he will set it right even if it means crashing this thing.“Doctor!Unlock this door!What are you _doing_ in there?”

“No, no he’s a good man!” Jo Grant wails a hundred years earlier.She throws herself in front of him like she’s protecting him from an explosion.“Kill me, not him!”

The timelines lurch again, jump far forward.There’s a Dalek chained in the dark.The last thing he’d ever expected to find at the end of this quiet search, the last kind of dissonant, mechanical protest he’d ever expected to hear again.The anger is poisonous, rolling off him, a foreign and alarming desire to _hurt--_ to inflict pain--to bring the same misery he’s been left carrying around the deep empty halls of space and time on his own, wearing guilt as a slipcover to hide under.

It screams--and there is a swell of perverse joy.Because he _wants_ it to scream.  

(“What the hell are you changing into?”)

“We have accepted your plea,” someone else says, in a dark room in a white robe.The Dalek is gone--was never there--replaced with a familiar Time Lord long before their demise at his hand.He can’t remember his name.“That there is evil in the universe that must be fought, and that you still have a part to play in that battle.”

“You mean--that you’re going to let me go free?”The words barely want to make it out of his old throat.  

The lord in the white robe seems to fight sounding amused.“Not entirely.”

It’s only a minute later he’s stammering out a plea--then shouting.“But you...you _can’t_ condemn me to exile...on...on one primitive planet in...in one century in time...!”

And while he says it, he is all-knowing.He’d laugh if he had any control at all.If only he’d known then how much it only sounds like a punishment.How much it would hurt when it’s taken away.

They make him change, and he cries out the whole time.No.No, no, _no_.Nononononononono.His most pitiful set of last words.  

(“I’m really glad that worked. Those would’ve been terrible last words. _”)_

But it’s a cold night in San Francisco.The sky is clear, there’s a light humid wind, his shoes are a phenomenal fit and finally, he can remember...

“Only a killer would know that,” Margaret says by candlelight, an entire lifetime and tragedy later. “Is that right? From what I've seen, your funny little happy-go-lucky little life leaves devastation in its wake. Always moving on because you dare not look back. Playing with so many peoples lives, you might as well be a god. And you're right, Doctor. You're absolutely right. Sometimes you let one go. Let _me_ go...”

“We’ve landed, Sarah.”But far be it from him for these stretching out timelines to have any kind of order.Maybe they do at that.

“Where?” she demands, sounding angry, even though she’d explained her packing was only a joke.She’d never intended to leave, but he can’t take her to Gallifrey.He can’t.  

“South Croydon.Hillview Road, to be exact.”  

Or, he supposes now, not so exact.

Jump forward and it’s the floor of the console room hard and familiar under his back, years and years after asking Sarah Jane Smith not to forget him.Sarah Jane with her sad eyes and fluffy white jacket, orchid pot under one arm.It’s started already, the itch and throb of it, the regeneration he’d only hoped would come.“Oh, it feels different this time.”  

“How can she do that?” Val Cane cries hysterically, only a week before but centuries after.“She’s got my voice! She’s got my _words_!”

“But they won’t say anything!”Susan insists, six hundred years earlier.  

“My dear child, of _course_ they will,” he admonishes. “Put yourself in their place!They’re bound to make some sort of a complaint to the authorities.”He gestures to Ian and Barbara, half-blockading the doorway.“Or at the very least, talk to their friends...If I do let them go, Susan, you do realize that we must go too...”

“No...Grandfather...”

“There’s no alternative, child.”

“I want to _stay_!”And so she did, so she did.And how he should have listened, but he was so young and obstinate, forcing his will on others because of what he deemed best.It’s been a long, difficult lesson--but he may have finally learned it.

(“Goodbye, Susan.Goodbye, my dear.”)

_“_ But would you _do it?”_ He feels the words come off his lips--a set of lips long remolded into others several times over.There’s a scarf tight around his throat.

“Yes...yes....” Davros replies.“To hold in my hand, a capsule that contains such power...to know that life and death on such a scale was my choice!”

“A hand!”Martha Jones says long afterward and a trillion years in the future, eyes gone round and focused tight on Jack Harkness, who gives one of his megawatt poster-boy smiles.One day that pretty face will be all that’s left of him.“A hand.In a jar.In your bag!”

_I don’t hear anyone knocking, do you?_ This one, just a voice in his head.His own voice, but also not.  

And then another voice, beloved and unmistakable but faceless, called out only moments before the webwork of his life had undone around him, the words ricocheting back in the cavern of his skull: Don’t look back!

He’s never been any good at doing what he’s asked.Or told.Not that this was always intentional.

Don’t look back?There was nowhere else to look, and there was no control.He can barely feel his body, his fingers gripping at handfuls of his hair.He’d heard before, how your life flashes before your eyes when it’s all over.He breathes deep, timelines tugging on his eyelids, spindling out on every vector imaginable.Chess with Leela.The sensory whiteout of the fog in the Gallifreyan Death Zone. Equation games with Adric. The airless scream of the Nightmare Child.A cargo ship drifting into a living sun.The voice of the White Guardian.  

Christmas snow in 1895 Cardiff.  

A grinning blonde in period dress, and the Doctor’s favorite feeling: falling in love.Laying his eyes on something wondrous and previously unseen, like seeing the burning wheel of a newborn sun in variable star v838 Monocerotis, the toxic downpour of mercury rain, brilliant emerald pillars of luminous dust and gas four light years tall, flash-frozen ocean waves twelve stories high, the cinematic slow-motion cataclysm of colliding galaxies.Something magnificent, _discovered_.  

He’d just never felt it for a _person_ before.  

In a fetal position in the collapsing liminal state, the Doctor shakes, his entire body reduced to raw nerve endings, a boil of cold bile burning in his throat.  Pain lances from his stitched arm, up through his shoulder blades before plunging down his spine.  It’s the feeling of slow suffocation, the pressure increasing, everything pushing and compressing from all sides like it’s alive and breathing, his skin prickling and crawling with the feeling of phantom insects.  

Don’t look back, she’d said.Don’t look back.

(“If you’re paying attention, Rose Tyler, it means we’re both a pillar of salt.”)

She’s not wrong.This will be the end of him, and here he is: Orpheus following Eurydice’s footprints back into the fire--though instead it’s a cross-section of the width and breadth of the entire miserable burning wreckage of his life so far.There are better ways to spend his last breath than choking on regret.  

But there is no forward.Not anymore.  

“Doctor," Rose says from somewhere, and his vision clears vaguely.He’s at a kitchen table, sitting with tea in the TARDIS galley, and Rose gives him a thin, almost apologetic smile.She’s asked him a question he can’t remember--can’t ever remember sitting here this way at all.He palms the teacup and leans back, exhaling a lungful of air and feeling the compression in his chest.It only takes a moment to notice he’s only got one heart, and there’s a feeling like a needle pushing into it, like a butterfly being pinned to an insect board.There’s an unpleasant sentiment simmering in his gut.Jealousy.His palms itch with it.

Rose casts a gaze over her shoulder.All this showboating and lip-biting and looking at the table top, and she still hasn’t quite come out with it. “I don’t want him to overhear, obviously.I just...maybe you’d know what I should do.”  

“Ab...about what...exactly?”It barely sounds like a voice; it’s soundless like a thought.He’s not even certain it’s in English.

“About that I’ve been back six weeks and he still won’t even touch me.What am I doing _wrong_?” 

She means the other Doctor.And he’s only opened his mouth to shakily reply before everything lurches, shifts and remakes itself like a bubble of mercury.Now Rose is in the doorway to a different kitchen, and instead of a teacup she’s hefting a tiny white-blond girl in a black and green jumper, shifting her onto one hip and looking delightfully irritated, talking out of the side of her mouth in an almost conspiratorial way.

“If we don’t leave for the airport now, Gemma and I have decided we’re getting on that zeppelin without you, Daddy.”She jostles the girl a bit, leaning in to speak close to a small ear buried in a towheaded fluff.“Aren’t we?”

The tiny girl squirms and throws her arms out, little hands balled into fists with the intense enthusiasm only achieved by the very young.She exclaims a wordless agreement with a four-toothed grin.

“And as a result, with your absence at another summit, you can kiss that CERN funding goodbye.Or _auf wiedersehen_ , I s’pose.”

“ _Well_.French is predominant in Geneva,” is what he says, nonsensically--it doesn’t reflect the volcanic storm boiling up inside him.He sounds so calm when inside he’s heaving, frothing, twisting, wanting to jump forward to embrace them both furiously just for the fact that they exist anywhere at all.“But I can think of other things I’d rather kiss--”

He stands from his chair and moves toward them, too slowly, what he says next utterly drowned by a sound, first like wind, then the scream of feedback.It’s the sound of his heart spilling open.Soundlessly, Rose is laughing to the soundtrack of a blaring alarm, Gemma squealing with absolute silent glee while he kisses the bottoms of her tiny bare feet.

The cooldown sequence is complete. 

But he doesn’t want to go.  

Not from here--not from this.He can’t hold onto it.Like river water through a broken flood barrier, the timelines twist in shape after shape.

_We will sing to you, Doctor._

Quick as a scream, everything else tumbles afterward, the potentials: his possible life in superposition.Donna and Rose in swimsuits, running down a beach with fine green, copper-based sand.His mouth tastes like coconut, and he’s happy.  

Martha Jones invents the first quantum transmat system, he’s there at the presentation for her first Nobel Prize.Jack and Ianto’s wedding: spectacular cake, even better music, dancing until sunrise.He takes Wilf to a planet covered in dry hydrogen ice, a hundred-million years before its first civilization, and watches the old man make snow angels like a giggling child.

Then he saves Luke from a speeding car.Mickey and Martha run from a Sontaran onslaught.Jack sits inexplicably in a dive bar on Deneb-19 with Midshipman Frame.Donna’s third wedding--the only one she’ll remember--and a lottery ticket.The kind of gift only the hidden silent Donna would properly appreciate.  

And Rose: young and grinning, doe-eyed in the falling snow.He’s in pain just watching her walk away.She doesn’t know him yet.In some realities, she never will.  

He wants to open his mouth, to call out to her with the intensity of a holy confession through the cold air, a plume of hot breath containing everything he’d never said.It’s New Year’s but he’d wanted Christmas--just in remembrance of one evening already long past. Paper crowns and new teeth: the first instance in lifetimes that he’d felt at home.

But he still doesn’t say goodbye.He knows now, his fear of endings is nothing pitiable.Nothing noble.It’s just...

Human. 

Ironically it's a frailty he'd developed long before he'd actually become one. 

It’s taken the rushing liquid pain in his chest to bring him back to himself, and it takes a moment of reorientation to locate the sound, and sensations, the wetness of his face.He’s crying, shoulders spasming, a hot red core blooming between his lungs, fed by his ratcheting breath.But already he’s forgotten why.  

It feels, rightly, as though it’s been centuries since the cannon deployed. An entire era of civilization, like children have been born, grown old and died in the time he’s lain in the merciless grip of his own past.Like everyone who has ever lived has long passed. Nine centuries in twenty minutes.

With vibrating fingers, blurring vision, a state of full liminality burst open wide, pulsing around him like something alive--a twitching welter of sky and stars and smoke, ice and fire and the crawl of black decay--he resets the coordinates, runs the subtraction modification and manages the presence of mind to initiate a deployment delay.He crawls, knees buckling out from under him like an infant, stopping a moment to retch emptily on the floor before collapsing inside the transmission booth.With a hiss, the door seals behind him, and there’s a countdown. Soft, digital beeping, counting imaginary clock ticks.  

There’s a feeling of compression, applied force, a kind of sickly inertia and a toxic taste on his tongue.Then there’s the wail of another alarm, the mirrored chamber flooded with red light.

Inside his head, every swell of the mechanical bell comes with the feeling of worms tunneling, insects burrowing, a chisel being tap-tap-tapped into the prison cell of his skull, where his innumerable memories wait like caged birds ready to burst free.

A small readout screen is set into the door control panel, and it’s flashing.Still pitched forward on the reflective floor, his own crimson-faced reflection staring up, he twists to one side, squinting, his eyes only adjusted enough to the glare to just make out the words.

SYSTEM FAIL.RESTARTING in 5...4...3...


	12. The Sound of Rain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, as ever, to Scullywolf for her patient and insightful beta of this chapter.

**12: The Sound of Rain**

There's a great, mechanical wheeze, and the alarm goes silent. For the way he can't quite breathe and the aggravating slow-motion that has become his default physical setting, it's like the mirror chamber is filled with the depth of space, dimensionally transcendental and encompassing the whole of the cosmos in a ten by ten box. A familiar setting, but airless and silent, where sound can't travel, where his weight isn't tethered by forces of gravity and electromagnetism. Where he's just drifting, helpless.

There's irony in the entire concept, but he cannot follow the thought to its ending. If this is just being a little bit human or the effects of an addled, stress-mangled mind, there's no way to know anymore. But it's a comfort, in a way. Effects of exposure to hard vacuum on a human body are well documented: pulmonary barotrauma, ruptured ear drums and ebullism, all of it mainly from rapid decompression. There would be blood deoxygenation, eventual hypoxia. If he'd left Rose as she'd asked, she would be here instead of him.

Here, and in pain. Here, and dying, or dead. He huffs out a breath, forcing his lungs to work. What he's imagining and what's the truth are once again not quite the same.

There's no vacuum, no loss of gravity, only his equilibrium. Only a proliferation of realities with physical properties far less hospitable to life than an air-conditioned laboratory. A carousel of air pressure, oxygen saturation and temperatures.

What he hadn't bargained for was that while his biology could withstand it for longer, that also meant a leisurely, unhurried, drawn-out death perhaps to make up for all the ones he'd summarily avoided. Nine of them, so far.

With arthritic hands that claw up like talons, he clutches at the door handle. He rattles it, pushes, but his strength is gone and it's sealed, shut down with the rest of the system.

His legs shake under him when he fights to stand, head spinning in a mass failure of his entire vestibular system, the wavering air pressure torturing his inner-ear structures. It's a kind of whole-system shock he's going through, like a baby animal taking its first steps after being birthed mid-run and dropped into the world half-blind and trembling. Except, really, being spontaneously born is remarkably less disorienting. He knows this from experience.

Swimming in the red caution light, hands braced against mirror and steel, the Doctor strains to remain upright and fails, slips sideways against the closed door, driving his wounded tricep hard against the jutting metal of the angular handle. Reality snaps back in place the moment he sucks in breath, reaches to clap a protective hand over the throbbing, fever-hot seam.

He flounders, swimming in fresh pain and somewhere off to his left, someone gives an open-mouthed, "Ha!"

Gritting his teeth, he bends his neck back to grimace at the mirrored ceiling where, reflected upside-down, he's sitting with his back against the door beside a familiar ginger-haired woman in a brown leather coat with her laced-together fingers lassoed around her tented knees.

She's just a reflection in a mirror, a hallucination both visual and auditory. "Donna. You're not really here."

She's an just image, reflected thoughts instead of light, but still she smiles wide enough that he can see the flash of her teeth through the mental shadow of his increasing torpor. "You wanna bet?  _Blimey_ , that missing bit of Time Lord is giving you a fit. Look at you, all sixes and sevens. This reality is collapsing, you've only so much time to get this right."

The Doctor-Donna rocks back a little and says, "You might be total rubbish as a human, but have a moment outside of feeling sorry for yourself and  _remember_ , dumbo.  _Two-way_ -biological metacrisis. What's that mean?"

"It means..." he licks his dry lips and tastes blood. The seesawing air pressure has his nose bleeding, running past his mouth, hot and wet rolling down the side of his neck. There's a hot pulse of it trickling backward from his nasal passage down his throat, and his stomach does a barrel roll inside him, like it can squeeze it all back out.

"If it's in your head, it's in mine, Doctor."

He groans on reflex at the very idea. "And how's that feel?"

"Cramped," she says with a grin, inclining her head sideways like she's thinking something she's considering keeping to herself. Which is ridiculous as she's not really here, and he's the one thinking whatever she's not saying. "And at the same time, it's...I dunno. Lonely? It's like...being in a crowded room packed shoulder to shoulder and feeling completely alone. Like lightning without thunder, you know what I mean? Or being underwater, where it's so silent outside that all you can hear is how loud everything is in your head." She makes a face. "Nevermind that. Two-way metacrisis, Spaceman, try and keep up. If it's in your head, it's in mine. And?"

"And...and if..." He chokes. His cranium is made of heated iron, he can hear the imaginary boiling of his gray matter.

"And if it's in my head, it's in yours. And how's that feel, now?"

"Feel?" He's sliding again, everything loses its edges and he's in a watercolor painting, all in shades of reflected red: scarlet, crimson, carmine, jasper.

"Yeah," she says, lips pulling across her teeth in a confident smile: the one she'd always been carrying around, hidden under the hatboxes and luggage of her enormous self-doubt. The one she'll have to unearth all over again from where it's buried under the phantom weight of the definitive explanation of the mpemba effect, methods for exceeding the speed of light and the truth of the photon particle-wave duality.

"How's it feel, having the best temp in Chiswick there inside your thick Time Lord skull?"

Weakly, head spinning, he laughs around the taste of blood. "Wizard."

He imagines he can feel Donna's hand pet his flat, grimy hair, and his eyes burn in the bright red haze under their lids.

That watercolor kaleidoscope of red. Ruby, cerise, cinnabar, poppy, oxblood.

"Oi, it's no use throwing cheek at me, I'm not even  _here_ , remember?"

"You're always here," he says, eyes slipping closed.

His wounded arm twinges again from the previous impact, new pain flashing through him, cramps tightening the muscles in the soles of his feet. He reaches for it on instinct, and in the emergency light, his hand comes away wet.

His unseaming wound, his nose, the light. Everything red.

Vermillion. Cardinal. Cadmium. Rose-madder.

No, not that last one. The last one isn't fair. He can't think about it anymore, he's already coming apart.

Everything red and everything coming apart. Shrinking. Collapsing around him. The air pressure increasing now as though he's dropping in a diving bell. The bones in his neck ache, they creak and grind.

"You're hopeless, you are. Look at you. Sometimes I think you're only happy if you're miserable. First companion in a dog's age, one that's lovely and brave and  _blonde_ , and what do you do? You take her to see her planet burn. And I thought  _I'd_  been on bad dates."

"Never told you about that. Not any of it."

"Your head, my head, remember? Besides. You told me enough, and it doesn't make a difference now what you said or didn't. You know that. All that matters is now. Here, because for you that's all there is, this moment. Outside of time. Kind of literal, suppose, but the idea itself's common. It's just the goal of every religion in the universe, isn't it? The divine silence. Even for you, even your people believed it. One moment unbound by time, unbound by flesh. That's the closest a Time Lord has got to faith. Is it the closest  _you've_ got to one?"

His own thoughts out of the Doctor-Donna's spectral mouth. He's not even certain he's been listening to her voice or someone else's. It could even be his own, a past voice, a future one. If it's English or High Gallifreyan. Judoon or Aramaic or Ancient North Martian.

A voice dark as the lightless corners of existence had once asked him something much the same.

"It's a belief," he croaks. Maybe out loud, maybe not. He has loads of them, beliefs. Just as he'd told himself not long before, laying sweat damp and naked on a medical table, teetering on an edge and then plummeting over it-that for all his lives he'd been seeking that kind of fulfilled, unhurried stillness.

A quietness of the metaphorical soul, the kind sought universe-wide by fasting, by meditation, by communion. Prayer. Music. Drugs.  _Sex_. The divine silence that means nothing at all without the person who'd helped him find it.

Purgatory in place of heaven.

It's worth noting that on the other side of that one moment of perfect silence, like looking down into a clear pond and seeing sky on the other side, there had been his other self, staring back. The telepathic window blown wide open by the loss of his own mental noise, he'd experienced the increasing misery of his other self over what felt like years passing while time remained imaginary in this liminal world of everything in-between. But now, looking through that mental window is like looking into the dark, trying to see the bottom of a well, make shapes out at twilight.

All that comes through is static. A tremble of something, a shiver in the otherwise mirror calm terrorscream of silence. Not divine, but desolate.

He's alone now. Split off entirely. The remnant connection is gone.

He may fade away, body failing, but his consciousness may survive, diffused here like something dissolved in a liquid, like a ghost in a house, haunting this limbo between time and space with all his regrets, his consciousness seeping into the walls like the smell of smoke. His consciousness: the conglomerated product of every moment of his life, because a man is the sum of his memories. An identity is encoded in neurons, in engaged synaptic plasticity, linked synapses in the hippocampus, electrical fingerprints housed in a circuit of tissue.

Coded energy trapped in a cage of flesh, like a Time Lord. Like himself. Hell, like anything that's living and thinking. Life is energy imbued with the cognizance of its own survival from moment to moment, each second a combination of everything that came before.

All those starting points, those initial conditions forming every second afterward, the primary idea driving chaos theory and that swinging pendulum. Lifetimes of moments chaining together end to end, his own and everyone's he's ever come across and everyone he hasn't.

And somehow, by accident or not, The Doctor met Rose Tyler. This is how long their forever lasted. As long as any forever can.

Rose who became the exception to every rule about himself, and the standard candle for everything else. Rose, who became his faith by restoring it. It's nothing short of cruel that now he's lost both once again. There is no limit to the amount of times someone can find themselves orphaned anew.

The pressure in the room has his ears ringing. It presses the breath from his lungs. But inside his head, Donna nods vaguely, maybe indicating the arm he's still protectively swaddling under his hand, but maybe not.

"It hurts, doesn't it?"

"Didn't bargain for the system overload," he says aloud, which if there were anyone around to hear, would sound rather like he was talking to himself. "Should have remembered the cooling system is compromised, it won't engage if it's still past the safe temperature threshold."

"So-can't you fix it? "

"Let's think. No tools, locked in a lead-lined room in a collapsing reality." He coughs. "Dwindling oxygen. All I have to do is repair the most sophisticated piece of technology ever conceived with my bare hands, from the inside."

"Thought you loved a challenge."

He coughs instead of laughs. "And I'm not so sure it's really in need of repairing exactly. I just need to speed up the cooling process. If I can open up the access panel-"

"You did say you would wait."

"When did I say I'd wait?"

"In the pumping station. With the water rising, you said, if you'd known there was a way to get into the parallel world with enough work or patience...you'd have waited."

"I said I'd wait if it made a difference."

"Open your eyes, Doctor. You're not here any more than I am. You've been thick before, but you're competing for new levels. You've fought too hard for you to let it end with you philosophizing your way into oblivion when I've already given you the answer. Time Lord or not, you're still  _you_  in case you've forgotten." Donna slingshots her arm forward, giving him a solid, ham-fisted blow in his stitched arm.

On reflex, he recoils, cries out. Donna is gone, her hand replaced with his own, knuckles red in the crimson light, the threads of reality once more drawn back into place, the misery sharp and insistent before beginning to recede.

The pain. It occurs to him, immediately after his injury, he'd noted to Rose how much less probability variance was visible inside the Torchwood basements. He'd launched into a long chain of possible explanations for this perceived phenomenon, but she'd never agreed.

So, again, he reaches back to his stitched-up arm and grips, presses his fingers hard into the ridge of sutures under the bandage and sleeve of his borrowed shirt, and the pain is immediate, demanding attention. The protest of his nerve endings snaps the threads of reality back into a pattern his mind and sense of spatial reasoning can decipher, even as it robs the scant breath from his lungs.

And that's just it. This reality, or what's left of it...without any observer but himself, his perceptions are everything.

He wheezes airlessly at it. Not a laugh really, but not much else.

"Exposure to various pain stimuli has been widely chronicled to alter the sufferer's perception of the spacetime available in the subject's neural circuitry," Donna reminds him, though she's retreated back into the labyrinth that is his mind, a new Minotaur to inhabit the dark halls of his memory. "Resulting in the general perception that time slows down in moments of crisis to allow the brain to parse an overload of stimulus."

When he says nothing, she sighs with enough exasperation for both of them.

"You've revealed yourself to be not great at hints, Doctor, so I'll spell it out. You are the only observer, and it's not a perfect liminal state so long as there's a constant. Deterministic curves are a collection of constants and variables, so if you choose a constant, in this case, your physical location, you're only exposed to the superposition of variables in relation to that constant. Do you see the problem?"

It's less Donna now than his own thoughts in her voice, disembodied and floating like a vanished midair cheshire cat telling him which twisting Wonderland path is the way home.

"That means you- _you_  are a variable and your brain, all those barmy Time Lord circuits are at odds with that, because it's hardwired to consider yourself the constant. The more your mind tries to make itself the constant, the more your perception will force the location into a variable state. You'll jump around like before, skipping around in your own life like, I dunno...a choose your own adventure book? Always hated those. I knew other choices existed in the same book and I could only have one, but going back felt like cheating."

Blimey. Is this what it feels like to talk to him?

"In any case," she says, "you can't be lost if the constant still exists. So before you start kicking open panels and trying to do something that'll make the wait longer, it's time you put that faith of yours to use. You're quick to decide to lower yourself into a bottomless pit before you'll just wait. You even told Rose what she did wasn't waiting 'cos you think waiting's just sitting and doing nothing. Like waiting isn't really the ultimate act of faith for someone who can't sit still."

"You're asking me to sit and do nothing and calling  _that_ waiting."

"Your head, my head, remember? Bound to be some crossover. And it's not  _nothing_. Use what you have to keep your perceptions sharp until the machine is ready or they come looking for you from the other side. Stop thinking you can make every decision alone. You said  _together_. It's time you learned what together means. Really, that's what you needed to hear from me, isn't it? Not about constants and variables or pain stimulus. Just the kind of kick in the arse you usually need."

Around him, the walls groan and shudder, a sound deep and rolling like the movement of a continent: the dimension cannon struggling to reboot. In one reality or all, wherever it exists. There's the hum of the pumps working, and the red lights wane. Above him by the door access, there's a mess of digits in green: the falling reactor temperature, particle entropy readouts. There's a countdown:  _Three minutes_  until next attempt.

Donna laughs, submerged back in the depthless ocean of his memory where she belongs. But it's a familiar, comforting kind of sound. It wraps a wire around his heart. "Remember me, Doctor."

Oh, don't they all say it. There's nothing worse: the fear of being forgotten, non-existence, a kind of conjugated death. Because remembrance is existence. It's the ingrained genetic memory of every living, thinking thing. A sort of hive-mind of sentience, like ants in their earthenware city, working toward a common goal of leaving their mark. Their life after death. No one can know how they'll be remembered. All they can do is hope for the best.

And it's funny, the things you'll remember about a person. The impressions they leave, the sound of their laugh or the smell of their clothes, their likes and dislikes, their fears and bad jokes archived forever, that time together still existing as an extended series of events, dispersed energy that cannot be destroyed. It's one of the reasons he's never gone back to visit past companions. Once their time was over, he could keep himself from knowing their eventual fate by steering clear, keeping them from being fixed as deceased in his own timeline. He could invent the best and worst for them, his own kind of handcrafted immortality. A kind sort of immortality with all the rough edges worn down smooth.

He replies out loud. At least he thinks he does. "No one's going to forget you."

"I didn't say you'd forget," she says with an audible smile. "But remembering and just not forgetting, they aren't the same thing."

He tries to reply, but he's slipping again. Despite the clarity the pain brings, like everything else, it doesn't last. He's jumping again, unstuck in his own timeline, flailing to catch grip on anything he can, snagging threads of probability in his fingers like a spider clutching a web.

With numb fingers, he grips his wounded arm hard enough he feels the rumble in his throat when he cages a cry behind his teeth. Somewhere in space where he still has fingers, they're slippery with blood. He can hear the sound of his sad little single heart, flexing and relaxing and tripping, keeping him alive; the pain is the only thing that can make everything clear.

It sounds like something Rose had said. Something in her grief counseling. Bargaining. Not willing to give up because she couldn't go back.

He'd told her, not long ago, that he'd never been one for not looking back. For doing what he was told. Just believing rather than seeing.

Faith in place of verification.

He slips, and he's standing in a field in 1913, and it's raining. He's standing on a red-grassed knoll on the north coast of Wild Endeavor, copper binary sunlight made from the radiance of yellow and red dwarf stars locked in the death spiral of each other's orbit. He's on a boat, sailing across the reef in Burm en'Chattur where the blue water turns to green.

He's on a drifting ship a few parsecs off the Rigel star system during the war, watching the warp and stretch of time and space, the unfurling fractals of luminous gas in a star nursery like glowing smoke, like blood in water. He's on a beach in Norway, standing alone among the fjords in the midnight sun, disappointed to learn the bay is called Biskopshavn in the only universe he can reach it.

He's everywhere and he's nowhere. But everywhere he is, it's empty.

He doesn't know where he is. He's walking, a great manor house somewhere, but devoid of life or any signs of it. No furniture or debris, just a great empty space at what's either before dawn or after dusk-the magic hour in-between that poets have forever coined artistic phrases to describe. When all cats are gray. The hour between dog and wolf.

The past is the beginning of the beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. Someone famous said that, he just can't remember who. He can't even remember being in this house.

He stands at the foot of a staircase crowned with high windows, and calls into the shadows made silhouettes with half-light.

"Rose?"

If it's past, or future, or present, he can't tell anymore. Maybe there's no such thing. Before he can think why, it's gone. There's heat and a feeling of falling. Of speed and motion, terminal velocity and creaking ear drums. He's falling off that plummeting edge of the world as he'd imagined it, a willing hostage to momentum and gravity. He's falling into a sky full of stars like an ocean and vaguely, he wonders, if he were to die-rather, when he dies-whose life will flash before his eyes.

Instead, he dreams of a crack in a wall.

It's abstract, insubstantial and small. He remembers nothing of it when the first threads of light finally reach him, secluded and forgotten at the bottom of a black womb of sleep.

He struggles into wakefulness, blinking languidly at the liquid flux of moving shadows and light that form the horror of the new, unfamiliar world.

It's dark and he's lying in damp sheets, simultaneously cold and hot, and he shifts weakly against the discomfort, unable to escape it. Efforts invested in something so simple as attempting to turn his head produce little movement, just a twitch of muscle that feels like trying to overturn a mountain. His throat burns, head echoing the thunder of a far-off, clouded-over headache. The pulsing ache in his arm is queerly absent in a way where it still leaves a shadow. Not gone, simply removed from the picture, leaving a sharp negative almost as tangible as pain itself.

Nearby there's a looming metal skeleton decked medical machinery, with cannisters and dials, digital readouts, miles of cable and cannula tubing, wilted bags of saline solution hanging like clear grapes from a steel vine. LCDs monitor EKG activity, blood-oxygen saturation, respiratory functions. The rest of the room is hidden by an accordion curtain stretched on a steel frame. This only looks like privacy; pinheads of red lights in the dark make no effort to hide the fact that he's under surveillance.

Outside the far window, through open blinds, there's a sweep of retina-searing light, and a hum that drones over the low . Across the charcoal backdrop of the midnight cloudcover, a zeppelin passes-a wingless, hulking shape moving slow as a moon.

Even through the walls he can hear it: the sound a city makes when it breathes. Upon waking in the dark, before the sunlight, when there are still streetlights, it begins—a kind of great, endless exhale. It's the sound of distance and concrete, of tires on pavement, the robotic sigh of H-VACs and motors like something forever expanding, the audible blue-shift of an entire universe made from steel and glass. Something living with a pulse of electricity and motion.

Pete's World. Zeppelins and digital Vitex marketing. And if he concentrates past the electrical hum of chemicals in his bloodstream, he can feel it:  _time passin_ g. Like the feeling of standing in moving water, a kind of subliminal current moving between things. He has no certainty whatsoever about how long he's been here, how much time has passed while he's slept. It manages to feel ineffably like it could be both seconds and centuries at once, the way someone can seem to dream for hours in the duration of a few minutes.

His arm has been rebandaged, bound securely across his chest in a medical sling made of blue and white fabric. There's an intravenous needle protruding from the crook of his good arm, a heart monitor secured on his chest with that waffle tape that won't rip out hair, the readout blipping out a silent rhythm recorded by a digital interface as a jagged blue line showing the rest and relax of his heart. An affirmation of life, that single beating heart calling out to the rise beyond the distant stars, asking to be remembered.

He laughs. It's a dry, brittle sound, and it carries to the edges of the room, sound waves ricocheting off the hospital walls and back to his ears, as the laws of physics properly govern.

It's a kind of laughter like an avalanche, it bursts out of him, gaining speed and quiet quantity until it's unstoppable and his arms feel too weak to wipe away the tears that roll from the corners of his eyes and down his temples.

On the edge of the room, beyond the edge of the steel-framed privacy curtain there's a rustle and a breath. Before his eyes can make out the shape, it's already moving toward him on rubber soles. There's a click and the sudden flood of what's really a dim bedside lamp but feels momentarily like the looking into the sun, and he flinches from it.

She begins slowly, uncertainty plain in her careful movements, and he can feel the soothing balm of her presence before he can focus on her face. The light is not so bright that her features are immediately visible, but even the blurred edges are the most breathtaking thing he's ever seen.

His voice creaks out of his dry, tight throat like the hinge of a long unopened door. Like he hasn't spoken for a thousand years. "Rose."

Her face, half-focused, buckles but recovers quickly. She laughs through the gathering of tears, but says nothing at first-instead just reaching for him and accepting the weak, one-armed embrace he can offer in return, breathing against his skin for a full minute before drawing herself back upward, tucking her hair back and looking at his face the way people look at paintings.

"What  _happened_?"

"You're supposed to tell me," she half-scolds, catching her palm against his cheek to turn his face into the light. "Are you in pain? I could give the nurse a shout."

"I'm alright."

"You always say that, even when it's not true."

"When is it not true?" he play-grouses, his responses still sleepy and delayed while he allows her silent inspection.

"All the time. They brought you in here catatonic, bordering on hypothermia. They put you on a respirator until your breathing normalized. Your stitches were torn open, you were losing blood, totally unresponsive."

"It's fine now. I'm fine."

"It's not fine," she insists, voice hard but hands still clutching him. "Doctor, tell me what happened."

"The cooling system was still compromised...the sequence wouldn't engage below a safe threshold," he begins, blinking, squinting like it might jog his memory. Somehow he can't quite remember it all now, like he's only half-remembering some dream he'd only happened upon the tail end of, a feverish fantasy he'd suffered in the deep, lightless trench of his unconsciousness. It's like maybe his whole life has been that way, something remembered, slipping away upon waking.

Something forever in-between. He's not sure it really matters now. Any of it.

"It took hours for them to configure a biological signature sweep to a backward reaching curve. With all that talk about how my biology couldn't withstand it, every minute I was thinking-" her voice seizes up and, finally in focus, she swats away tears with palms slid flat over her cheeks.

"How did they manage it? You explained the necessity for a negative spatial delay in the geodesic interval?"

She chuckles, sniffing back a more emotional response. "No no, not in so many words. Wish you could've been more clear. It took some time..."

"But you explained it," his eyes slip closed on an exhausted smile. "You explained variations to their established understanding of the temporal Lorentzian manifold and they  _listened-_ " he interrupts his own proud overture and sits up suddenly, propped on his free elbow and pitching to the side. "What about Jackie?"

"Asleep now, I'd reckon, like everyone else. When she first came through, she was talking jibberish, had a touch of fever. Kept talking about when I was a little girl-or when she was a little girl. Confusing some of it for the future, like it hadn't happened yet. She said we'd gone to Tony's wedding," she laughs dryly, licking her lips. "But she's fine now, all sorted. Knows the year and everything." With gentle fingers, she strokes back his hair.

"Have they run vitals on her? On you?"

"Shh. For once, just let me worry about you. Does your arm hurt?"

He shakes his head, shoulders giving an involuntary jump of laughter he can't quite explain. "Not anymore."

"Doctor," she begins. Her voice is tight, eyes averted toward the dark glass of what he can see now is less a window and more a sliding door. "This can't...this can't be how you keep doing things. You jumping ahead into self-sacrifice every time something presents itself because you've forgotten you're not invincible."

"Rose, I was anything but invincible."

"You know what I mean. They brought you in this morning and...I looked at you, just lying there. It might have been worse than not even knowing where you were. 'Cos, Doctor, I've already seen you dead on a gurney, and thing is, I think you know exactly what that's like. I won't just sit by and watch that world become a reality that I can't fix. Not anymore than you could. Or would. You can't go throwing yourself into the center of every disaster we might come across because you're so used to thinking it's your responsibility to do it."

He tries to smile, but can't quite manage it.

"But at the same time, I can't ask you to promise not to do something you know is right, or something that has to be done, because...someone who could keep that promise just..." With her lips pressed into a tight line, Rose nods, sniffs, turns her eyes to the ceiling while she dries tears with the heel of her hand. "Just wouldn't be  _you_."

"Yeah?"

She tips her head to the side, eyes bright. " _Yes_."

The smile comes easier this time. There's a long, dense pause that all but vibrates like a plucked string. After all this time, it feels like it should. "She  _might_ have seen Tony's wedding. Could be."

"What?"

"Theoretically," he amends, clearing his throat. "Particularly in an unobserved state, it follows that the physical mind might exist in multiple states in a coherent enough margin to experience memories out of order. Quantum entanglement can reach either direction in time to accomplish equilibrium."

"I thought..." she fumbles with the tangent, opening her mouth and shutting it twice before managing anything further. "I thought the future wasn't decided yet."

"It's not.  _Well_. Not in those terms. Our ability to remember the past but not the future has more to do with a buildup of correlations between interacting particles exchanging information in a single direction to reach equilibrium. All particles are really only the probabilities that are ascribed to them. So photon particles come through your eyes to interact with your optical nerve and neural impulses, vibrations in sound waves with your eardrums-wham. Information exchange. What's a better explanation, probably, is that there isn't only one future. All futures exist simultaneously, but physical matter is limited by those particle correlations, so electrically based sentience that relies on physical matter like neurons or data matrices to sustain it can only perceive the consequential results of single sets of collapsed wave functions at a time. The Time Lords wanted to be rid of their bodies. That's only one of the reasons why."

"Doesn't seem that you're any worse for wear. I'd be interested in hearing more about that bit later, but in English for a change," she puffs out a breath that has the same hissing cadence of laughter without the sound. "Did you see it, though? The  _future_?"

The way she drags out the last word out makes his clothes feel too tight, which is remarkable since he's barely wearing any.

"Could have done," he says. " _A_ future, at least, maybe not  _the_ future but either way, in this state I wouldn't have access to those memories. Time doesn't work that way, Rose."

"No? How does it work, then? Reckon it's time I knew."

There's a rattle of raindrops on the glass of the sliding door that's hiding behind those open blinds. It's a moment before he reaches to throw the covers back and extricates his legs. He's sliding the IV needle from the crook of his arm with a show of clenched teeth while Rose protests.

"I only asked because I thought you'd explain yourself right back to sleep!"

He shrugs out of her fluttering hands, craning to the side to switch off the cardiac monitor before peeling the secured sensor carefully from his chest. He climbs out in slow motion, standing weavingly in his hospital gown and cotton trousers before moving to the sliding door, his shadow strung thin across the floor before him, stretched long and thin as spider legs across the high polished hardwood.

"Doctor!"

"Come on, Rose," he holds his free hand out, open, for her to take. He wiggles his fingers at her. When she takes his hand, he feels, for the first time in what feels like a century but isn't, entirely like himself. Not like he's crashing a party simply by being alive. Not like a stranger or an abomination.

He leads her out onto the balcony with its smell of ozone and wet concrete, the tidal roar of rain slanting in curtains against rising wind, the clipped hiss of tires cutting across rainy asphalt at a nearby junction. The sounds of a world in motion, even in the dead of night.

"Is this a new pastime for you?" she says, squinting, voice raised over the flat din of falling water. "Running out onto rainy balconies at inopportune moments?"

"Moments, yes, I'm getting to that..." He turns her toward the railing, looking out into the gray ribbon of the sidestreet below. They're at Canary Wharf, a medical wing at Torchwood. It's like they've never left. "Look at every raindrop. Too numerous to count, millions upon millions of them, falling toward the pull of gravity. Every moment of every life. Then the wind picks up."

Standing behind her, it's almost second nature to slide his unbound arm around her waist, but the concept still comes with a well-ingrained warning bell. He hesitates, then executes the maneuver, which results in Rose tipping slightly, settling her weight backward, the curve of her skull set back against his collarbone in a heady kind of familiarity.

"The wind picks up. Comes out of the dark, and it pushes the raindrops forward, faster, slower, crashing them together. They collide with each other, sometimes with objects they can't budge, but they keep moving, not always in the same direction. It can shift, bluster, form eddies and vortices but still no one ever accuses the wind of being imaginary. Even if there's a day where it's not windy at all, it doesn't mean wind stopped existing."

"Didn't catch a word of that," she drawls.

"Yeah, it got away from me. I think they gave me medication."

Her head tips back and she laughs with her mouth open. She's the kind of person who laughs with her whole body like it's an art form, some kind of interpretive dance to the music of her mirth. It's a contagion, that sound, one that he briefly catches while she sways, turning gently in his one-armed hold, looking up at him in the humid dark with her eyelashes pasted together and her golden hair wilting, clinging to her throat. She's a vision, a breathing microcosm of the virtues and vices of humanity like she was made in a crucible just for him, and somehow-by accident or not, they met.

She exhales. A long, slow breath outward in the wake of her laughter while she speaks, enunciating out of the side of her mouth, raising her eyebrows while she bites into the words. "So the raindrops are events. The wind is time."

" _Well_ , it's more like the wind than like an arrow. Just, you know, cause and effect. 'And-then, and-then', everything in one direction because of how particles equilibrate with each other. Time is just a duration quantifier, just another number in a set of directions. But it doesn't mean there's no such thing as south if you're only travelling east."

"So does it matter, then?" she asks. "Anything we do, does it matter at all? Or is everything written already and we just haven't turned the page? A bit depressing."

"Course it  _matters_. With every future available, everything that could ever be possibly waiting on that next page, nothing is impossible. Keeping with your book metaphor, it's Choose Your Own Adventure far more than it's a Tale of Two Cities." He pauses there, inexplicably unsettled. It's like he's missing something, forgetting something important. He listens, as though the answer will come to him; instead it's just the sound of rain. "Joy and tragedy could wait in equal measure, but no decision is real until you make it that way. It's not depressing, Rose. It's uplifting. Inspirational, even."

With a little nod, she gives him that smile of hers, the pink peek of the tip of her tongue. "Always cheated at those," she says. "Does it ever get boring, knowing everything?"

"Never could know everything. Especially not here. New new universe."

"You'll get bored eventually. You'll be restless and pacing the floor, desperate to stand under any sky except this one."

Maybe he will-he'll get bored or restless or irritated, but it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. Not the hour or the day or the month of whatever year. Not even the rain and the dark and the wind by night, simulating the time in its motion and silence, alternating hot and cold, mercurial and lonesome.

"I've seen a lot of skies, Rose Tyler. Skies are ten a penny, but this? Not all of time and not all of space. Still, where do you want to go?"

"Go?" she laughs again. "Go  _where_? It's the middle of the night, and  _you_ don't even have a legal identity much less a passport _-_ "

"Anywhere. How about Peru? The Seychelles. India, Ayers Rock, oh-I dunno, architecture in Prague? Ice shelfs in Greenland, a festival in Old Kyoto, sunset on Reunion Island? Somewhere oceans away, where it's still yesterday. Where we haven't missed it. Or," he tangents, interrupting himself with a little purse of his lips and a slight clearing of his throat. "Here, even. Right here, somewhere past midnight in rainy London. Just...anywhere, Rose. Every moment and every thing that's ever happened in the history of the universe-a million million tiny little raindrops put together just right to make up this moment right now. How do you want to spend it?"

He watches her smile crest like a sunrise, his heart beating too hard and too fast, and there's silence again. Just breath and the sound of rain; it's everything he could ask to have.

By way of reply, she kisses him. Up on her toes, her soft mouth on his, and just like every time before it's like time forgets to flow, a contained moment, their own personal liminality.

It's as good a start as he could hope for. A start to a home cemented in one place because it need not be anywhere else, a place to return to, a place where he can turn a key in a lock and walk into a life he's built with someone else. A day after day drudgery rendered beautiful by belonging, but his existence is nothing if not increasingly bizarre-an open system of entropy all on its own.

It's the same allure of the unknown as he's ever chased. The unseen, the brand new, the never-been. It's what's driven him forward for all his lives, and for it to apply to this, the promise of the mundane as the greatest adventure: it's the kind of thing he'll never really understand.

And maybe understanding isn't the point. Has never been the point, because understanding isn't the same as knowing. Because here, in the middle of the night and in the dark is a brand new start, a new initial state. A new loop, a new swing of the pendulum.

It's not going to be perfect, but trouble is just the bit in between. There will be bad days, but even bad days are a gift. Because he is dying,  _they_  are dying, slowly, day after day, withering in slow motion the way that mountains will one day become dust, the way even stars burn out. He stands here spinning toward the silent oblivion of immortality as memory, and it doesn't matter. On a long enough timeline, the only constant is change. He is no longer part of the greatest irony ever conceived: the laws of time being governed and harbored by a race of beings with so much of it at their disposal that they did not value it. But  _his_  time is moving again, towards its inevitable result, but he'll never be anything but grateful that every moment of everything that had ever happened in his life and long before had led here, the far end of long ago.

To bystanders below in the near empty street, they are nothing out of the ordinary. Just two young lovers in sodden clothes, soaked through like countryside sinners saved in a river baptism, and in some ways they are exactly that: saved in a fixed flood instead of drowned in one.

Maybe it isn't forever, but this time together-this  _life_ is theirs, and what they make of it could be anything.

There's so much more to say, but words are just sounds. Just sounds that follow where something larger has been, and he, as ever, is at a loss. Eight billion languages and nothing comes to mind.


End file.
